Hurricane Florence, dubbed the “storm of a lifetime” by the National Weather Service, is expected to bring catastrophic flooding to the Carolinas.
Forecasters are warning that Florence could dump as much as 40 inches of rain in North Carolina alone.
But the storm now may not officially make landfall until the weekend, giving residents more time to evacuate.
Florence is a dangerous Category 4 hurricane Wednesday morning, with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph.
The path, intensity and timing of the storm is likely to keep changing through the day Wednesday but the latest forecast from the National Weather Service shows Florence will no longer be close to reaching Category 5 status — that is with winds of 145 mph.
“Hurricane Florence is continuing to be a major threat to the Carolinas as well as the mid-Atlantic. I think what we’ve seen overnight is a shift south,” Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview Wednesday on “Good Morning America.”
He added, “The trend is its continuing to dip south. The question is whether it will continue to do that today, and this is a highly dynamic situation that requires constant monitoring.”
The latest trajectory shows Florence beginning to slow down during the day Thursday. That’s when it will begin to encounter friction from land and weaken significantly.
Because of that slowdown, rainfall totals will be even higher than previously forecast. The southeast coast of North Carolina could see as much as 40 inches of rain — in line with the catastrophic flooding caused last year in the Houston area by Hurricane Harvey.
“This will likely be the storm of a lifetime for portions of the Carolina coast, and that’s saying a lot given the impacts we’ve seen from Hurricanes Diana, Hugo, Fran, Bonnie, Floyd, and Matthew,” according to one National Weather Service meteorologist in Wilmington, North Carolina. “I can’t emphasize enough the potential for unbelievable damage from wind, storm surge, and inland flooding with this storm.”
President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter that the storm is “looking even bigger than anticipated” but the federal government is “supplied and ready.”
In a subsequent video message posted to Twitter, Trump implored residents to “get out of the storm’s way” and “listen to your local representative.”
“They says it’s about as big as they’ve seen coming to this country — and certainly to the East Coast — as they’ve ever seen,” he said. “We’re fully prepared — food, medical, everything you can imagine. We are ready but, despite that, bad things can happen when you’re talking about a storm this size. It’s called Mother Nature. You never know, but we know.”
As many as 1.7 million people have been ordered to evacuate across South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Federal, state and local officials urged residents to heed those warnings.
“Today is your last day to get out of the areas that have been placed under evacuation orders,” Long said on “GMA.” “If you don’t do it now, your time is going to be running out. And once the impacts of this storm start to come in, it’s going to be very difficult for first responders to get to you.”
Long, a North Carolina native who lived through Hurricane Hugo in 1989, said Florence will also bring life-threatening storm surge wherever it makes landfall.
“This is going to be a big hit with storm surge at the coast,” he said. “People do not live and survive to tell the tale about what their experience is like with storm surge. It’s the most deadly part of the hurricane that comes in, it causes the most amount of destruction.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Tuesday cautioned that high winds and floodwaters could knock power out for “several days.”
“We’ll be asking people to prepare their emergency kit,” he said. “Get food, water, if there are medications they may need. Pull together their important documents … make a plan for your pets. Also, understand that a lot of people are going to be without power probably for several days if not longer.”
Many people were already on the road Tuesday.
“If they say leave, leave,” said Jennifer Forte, who was in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on Tuesday and headed toward Greenville. “And my job is closed. I work for the government, they’ve closed. The school’s closed until Friday, so there’s no reason to stay, really.”
As millions head out of the area, resources like the Red Cross are preparing to deal with the disaster.
“This is extremely serious,” Maj. Ken Morris with the Salvation Army’s Disaster Response Team told ABC News. “We’ve got a number of volunteers, actually we’ve got over 3 million volunteers across the nation that can help us. But we need our partners in mission. Folks have come through wonderfully in the past and again in non-affected areas. We’ve got canteens coming in. It’s like an accordion. As this thing increases, we increase our resources.”
ABC News’ Gio Benitez, Steve Osunsami and Morgan Winsor contributed to this report.
