ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — Hurricane Ian, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the U.S., swamped southwest Florida on Wednesday, turning streets into rivers, knocking out power to 2 million people and threatening catastrophic damage further inland.

A coastal sheriff’s office reported that it was getting many calls from people trapped in flooded homes. Desperate people posted to Facebook and other social sites, pleading for rescue for themselves or loved ones. Some video showed debris-covered water sloshing toward homes’ eaves.

The storm surge flooded a hospital’s lower level emergency room in Port Charlotte, while fierce winds tore part of its fourth floor roof from its intensive care unit, according to a doctor who works there.

Water gushed down from above onto the ICU, forcing staff to evacuate the hospital’s sickest patients — some of whom were on ventilators — to other floors, said Dr. Birgit Bodine of HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital. Staff members used towels and plastic bins to try to mop up the sodden mess.

The medium-sized hospital spans four floors, but patients were forced into just two because of the damage. Bodine planned to spend the night at the hospital in case people injured from the storm arrive there needing help.

“The ambulances may be coming soon and we don’t know where to put them in the hospital at this point because we’re doubled and tripled up,” she said. “As long as our patients do OK and nobody ends up dying or having a bad outcome, that’s what matters.”

The hurricane’s center made landfall near Cayo Costa, a barrier island just west of heavily populated Fort Myers. As it approached, water drained from Tampa Bay.

Mark Pritchett stepped outside his home in Venice around the time the hurricane churned ashore from the Gulf of Mexico, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) to the south. He called it “terrifying.”

“I literally couldn’t stand against the wind,” Pritchett wrote in a text message. “Rain shooting like needles. My street is a river. Limbs and trees down. And the worst is yet to come.”

A boat carrying Cuban migrants sank Wednesday in the stormy weather in waters east of Key West. The U.S. Coast Guard initiated a search and rescue mission for 23 people and managed to find three survivors about two miles (three kilometers) south of the island chain, officials said. Four other Cubans swan to Stock Island, just east of Key West, the U.S. Border Patrol said. Air crews continued to search for possibly 20 remaining migrants.

The Category 4 storm slammed the coast with 150 mph (241 kph) winds and pushed a wall of storm surge accumulated during its slow march over the Gulf. More than 2 million Florida homes and businesses were without electricity, according to PowerOutage.us. Nearly every home and business in three counties was without power.

The storm previously tore into Cuba, killing two people and bringing down the country’s electrical grid.

About 2.5 million people were ordered to evacuate southwest Florida before Ian hit, but by law no one could be forced to flee.

News anchors at Fort Myers television station WINK had to abandon their usual desk and continue storm coverage from another location in their newsroom because water was pushing into their building near the Caloosahatchee River.

Though expected to weaken to a tropical storm as it marches inland at about 9 mph (14 kph), Ian’s hurricane force winds were likely to be felt well into central Florida. In the hours since landfall, top sustained winds had gradually dropped to 90 mph (150 kph), making it a Category 1 hurricane crossing the peninsula. Still, storm surges as high as 6 feet (2 meters) were expected on the opposite side of the state, in northeast Florida.

Sheriff Bull Prummell of Charlotte County, just north of Fort Myers, announced a curfew between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. “for life-saving purposes,” saying violators may face second-degree misdemeanor charges.

“I am enacting this curfew as a means of protecting the people and property of Charlotte County Prummell said.

Jackson Boone left his home near the Gulf coast and hunkered down at his law office in Venice with employees and their pets. Boone at one point opened a door to howling wind and rain flying sideways.

“We’re seeing tree damage, horizontal rain, very high wind,” Boone said by phone. “We have a 50-plus-year-old oak tree that has toppled over.”

In Naples, the first floor of a fire station was inundated with about 3 feet (1 meter) of water and firefighters worked to salvage gear from a firetruck stuck outside the garage in even deeper water, a video posted by the Naples Fire Department showed. Naples is in Collier County, where the sheriff’s department reported on Facebook that it was getting “a significant number of calls of people trapped by water in their homes” and that it would prioritize reaching people “reporting life threatening medical emergencies in deep water.”

Ian’s strength at landfall tied it for the fifth-strongest hurricane when measured by wind speed to strike the U.S. Among the other storms was Hurricane Charley, which hit nearly the same spot on Florida’s coast in August 2004, killing 10 people and inflicting $14 billion in damage.

Ian made landfall more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Tampa and St. Petersburg, sparing the densely populated Tampa Bay area from its first direct hit by a major hurricane since 1921.

Flash floods were possible all across Florida. Hazards include the polluted leftovers of Florida’s phosphate fertilizer mining industry, more than 1 billion tons of slightly radioactive waste contained in enormous ponds that could overflow in heavy rains.

The federal government sent 300 ambulances with medical teams and was ready to truck in 3.7 million meals and 3.5 million liters of water once the storm passes.

“We’ll be there to help you clean up and rebuild, to help Florida get moving again,” President Joe Biden said Wednesday. “And we’ll be there every step of the way. That’s my absolute commitment to the people of the state of Florida.”

The governors of Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina all preemptively declared states of emergency. Forecasters predicted Ian will turn toward those states as a tropical storm, likely dumping more flooding rains into the weekend, after crossing Florida.

___

Associated Press contributors include Christina Mesquita in Havana, Cuba; Cody Jackson and Adriana Gomez Licon in Tampa, Florida; Freida Frisaro in Miami; Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee, Florida; Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida; Seth Borenstein and Aamer Madhani in Washington; Bobby Caina Calvan in New York; Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama, and Alina Hartounian in Phoenix, Arizona.

But this is a remarkably transparent political gambit even for a president to whom so little is holy, coming as it does on the eve of a natural disaster that threatens the southeastern United States.

On Tuesday night, Trump credited Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., for his decision to declare a federal emergency in the state ahead of Hurricane Dorian’s arrival. “At the request of Senator Thom Tillis, I am getting the North Carolina Emergency Declaration completed and signed tonight,” Trump tweeted. “Hope you won’t need it!”

The first problem with that is that senators don’t formally request states of emergency. Under federal law, that’s left to governors.

In North Carolina’s case, that governor is Roy Cooper, a Democrat. Cooper declared a state emergency Friday and formally requested the federal one Monday. Trump didn’t mention him in the tweet.

The second problem is that it’s clear that this was political payback, and there’s virtually nothing subtle about it. Tillis, as Wagner notes, is up for reelection in 2020, and he faces a difficult general-election contest and a well-funded primary foe, businessman Garland Tucker. He appears to have earned plenty of goodwill from Trump after his flip-flop on Trump’s border-wall national emergency, which he eventually supported after writing a Washington Post commentary against it.

And Tillis was clearly angling for some credit here, repeatedly tweeting about his talks with Trump about the federal emergency.

“Just got off the phone with President @realDonaldTrump,” Tillis tweeted Monday evening, saying Trump would be issuing the federal emergency. “Just spoke with President @realDonaldTrump again & he said an emergency declaration for NC would be made later tonight,” he tweeted Tuesday. When Trump tweeted his credit to Tillis, the senator retweeted it without correcting Trump or mentioning Cooper’s role.

“Thank you, Mr. President!” he said.

Fine. Tillis can certainly play a role in that process, too — even if he doesn’t formally make the request. And there’s nothing wrong with letting people you work for know you’re engaged and talking to the president.

But even if we set aside all of that: Was Trump really not going to declare a federal emergency in one of two states that are most directly in Dorian’s path, along with South Carolina? That state had already gotten one, as had Florida, Georgia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which appear to have escaped the worst effects of the hurricane. As you can see from this long list of hurricane-related federal emergency declarations, this is a matter of course. Many recent declarations were for storms whose names you’ve probably already forgotten.

Whether someone is politicizing a natural disaster is difficult to pin down; one person’s politicization is another’s raising of an important issue. Republicans accuse Democrats of politicizing hurricanes by citing climate change, for example, when Democrats and climate scientists think that’s pretty important.

But even accounting for that subjectivity, Trump’s prehurricane gambits have been pretty obvious.

There was the time he pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former sheriff in Arizona, as Hurricane Harvey was hitting Texas — and acknowledged that he did so with the hurricane in mind. “A lot of people think it was the right thing to do,” Trump said. “Actually, in the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they were normally.”

There was the time he lodged a conspiracy theory that Democrats had inflated the Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rico . . . less than 24 hours before Hurricane Florence was set to hit the Carolinas. (Even Florida Republicans disowned that Trump theory.)

Just last week, Trump called Puerto Rico corrupt and wrongly inflated the amount of Maria-related aid the U.S. territory received, even as it faced another blow from Dorian.

And before he was president, Trump previewed Hurricane Sandy in 2012 by arguing that President Barack Obama would use it to his advantage for his reelection bid.

“Hurricane is good luck for Obama again- he will buy the election by handing out billions of dollars,” Trump tweeted.

Trump even used the occasion to extend the deadline for his offer of $5 million for Obama’s birth certificate.

“Because of the hurricane, I am extending my 5 million dollar offer for President Obama’s favorite charity until 12PM on Thursday,” Trump said.

It has become pretty clear what’s on Trump’s mind when a hurricane is about to hit.

Aaron Blake is senior political reporter, writing for The Fix. A Minnesota native, he has also written about politics for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Hill newspaper.

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“This is one of the toughest decisions I have ever had to make. Thank you for an incredible journey and for the support you have shown me,” Long wrote in a long farewell letter emailed at 3:12 p.m. to FEMA staffers.

Long clashed with his direct superior, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in September, when Nielsen appeared intent on forcing Long out of his job even as Hurricane Florence dumped historic amounts of rain on the Carolinas. The relationship deteriorated when an internal investigation became public. The inspector general for Homeland Security looked into Long’s use of government vehicles to travel between Washington and his home in North Carolina.

In the middle of the storm, Long told colleagues at FEMA that he was on the verge of quitting. But he was popular in the agency and stayed – until Wednesday, when he surprised his colleagues with his decision to leave.

In an interview with The Washington Post in September, Long called his relationship with Nielsen “professional and functional” and added, “We both understand what needs to be done.” But behind the scenes, Nielsen was irritated with Long for not attending early morning meetings with top-level DHS staffers, and she disapproved of his absences from Washington when he visited his family in North Carolina, an administration official said in September.

The FEMA administrator has an unusual role. FEMA is part of Homeland Security, so Nielsen was Long’s boss, but a FEMA administrator simultaneously has authority to offer advice directly to the president during disasters. This competing chain of command contributed to the friction between Nielsen and Long, several current and former administration officials said.

Long, who had many years of experience in emergency management, easily won Senate confirmation when nominated to the FEMA post two years ago. He quickly had his hands full when Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas and dropped feet of rain, flooding Houston and killing dozens of people. That was soon followed by two more major hurricanes, Irma and Maria, and then controversy over the administration’s response to Maria, which left a death toll in Puerto Rico of nearly 3,000.

This past year saw two more epic hurricanes, Florence and Michael, and fatal wildfires in California.

“No one could have ever predicted the challenges we would face,” Long wrote in his farewell letter. “Over the past two years, we led this Nation through the toughest series of disasters ever experienced – our mission spanning half the globe.”

He also had to handle internal agency problems. He launched a campaign against sexual harassment, dubbed “Not on My Watch,” through which he vowed to eradicate what he called a “culture” of misconduct he said has persisted at FEMA for years. In August, he revealed misconduct allegations against the agency’s former personnel chief, who Long said was preying on female employees and in some cases transferring them to different offices to be near male staffers.

Meanwhile, Long became mired in the controversy over his use of government vehicles. Long’s improper use of government resources, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general determined, cost taxpayers $94,000 in staff salary, $55,000 in travel expenses and $2,000 in vehicle maintenance. FEMA officials have said Long took corrective steps in recent months to resolve the travel issue, which stemmed from the long-standing practice of FEMA administrators traveling in vehicles equipped with emergency communications gear.

An agency spokeswoman said Wednesday that his departure was unrelated to the vehicle controversy.

“It honestly has nothing to do with the travel issue. He’s been away from his family for a long time,” said Lizzie Litzow, the FEMA press secretary. “And he’s chosen this moment to make sure the new administrator has enough time to prepare for upcoming hurricane season before it hits.”

Long’s department had the agency buzzing Wednesday.

“He took the travel issue so personally that he never got over it,” said another FEMA official who was not authorized to speak to reporters.

The FEMA official said Long’s reputation remained strong among FEMA staffers, many of whom believe he was forced out by Nielsen’s office. “There’s no question they wanted him out,” the official said, “but whether he was forced out or decided to quit is difficult to pinpoint.”

A DHS official who works closely with Nielsen and who had spoken to Long rejected the idea that Nielsen wanted him out.

“We were surprised by this. We wanted him to stay, but the guy’s burned out. He’s exhausted,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe DHS personnel moves.

“Everybody likes the guy. He was good on TV,” the official said. “We didn’t think the car thing was a big deal.”

The investigation blindsided Long while he was coping with Hurricane Florence in his home state. Long had begun a signature project in the aftermath of the storm, embedding small groups of FEMA employees inside state agencies to create a more seamless response to the natural disaster. In an interview with The Washington Post during the Florence response, he recalled that the first major storm he lived through was Hurricane Hugo in 1989, when he was 14 years old.

“We had numerous trees down our yard. I think there were eight just across our driveway, no power for roughly 10 days, and I was out of school forever. And you know I think that that could have been a catalyst that got me really interested in disasters,” he said.

Asked about the controversy over his use of a government car, he said, “I walked to work. I’ve been bitten by a dog walking to work. I’m not even offered a parking spot in my own headquarters. So what’s being put out there, it’s far from the reality.”

In his farewell letter, Long wrote, “While this has been the opportunity of the lifetime, it is time for me to go home to my other family – my beautiful wife and two incredible boys. Life is too short not to be with the ones that you love most, and I need to ensure my boys grow up to exhibit the same levels of patriotism that you do. With that, I have respectfully resigned as FEMA Administrator.”

– – –

The Post’s Frances Stead Sellers contributed to this report.

By Joel Achenbach,William Wan,Lisa Rein and Nick Miroff, (c) 2019, The Washington Post

Stephen Flood will be charged with two counts each of reckless homicide and involuntary manslaughter, Solicitor Ed Clements told news outlets late Thursday. Joshua Bishop will be charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter, he said.

Flood and Bishop were fired from the Horry County Sheriff’s Office in October as part of an internal investigation. Authorities said the two deputies were driving 45-year-old Wendy Newton and 43-year-old Nicolette Green through Marion County to a mental-health facility as part of a court order when their van was swept away by rising floodwaters caused by torrential rains brought to the state by Hurricane Florence.

The powerful tropical system smashed into the Southeast coast as a hurricane Sept. 14, triggering severe flooding as it weakened yet nearly stalled over the Carolinas for days.

Green and Newton drowned in the back of the locked van on Sept. 18. Horry County officials have said that the deputies tried unsuccessfully to rescue the women from the van, which was on its side, blocking the door the deputies would have needed to unlock with a key. When rescue crews finally arrived, the van was underwater, and the deputies were plucked from its roof.

Working numbers for Bishop and Flood could not be found Thursday night. It is unclear whether they have attorneys.

Many roads in the northeastern part of the state were flooded out and blocked off in the days following the powerful storm. Authorities with the sheriff’s department have said that the deputies, in a marked sheriff’s department vehicle, were waved through a barricade near the Little Pee Dee River by National Guardsmen charged with keeping motorists out of the area.

The Little Pee Dee was one of several rivers officials watched closely in the days following the storm.

In the months since, a legislative committee has opened hearings into the incident, discussing potential changes to the laws on how patients who are committed to mental hospitals are handled by police.

____

Meg Kinnard can be reached on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

Google this morning released its 18th annual Year in Search lists, documenting top trending searches in Denver and across the globe.

The top-trending searches for Denver are those that had the highest spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2018 as compared to 2017.

No. 1 on the list for Denver: World Cup. And why not? The 2018 World Cup played in Russia and won by France in July garnered global interest. Locally, Denver is among 23 North American cities in the running to host 2026 World Cup games.

In Denver’s Nos. 2, 3 and 5 spots are celebrities who died in 2018: Mac Miller, a 26-year-old rapper who died on Sept. 7 in Los Angeles of a drug overdose; Anthony Bourdain, 61, the celebrity chef and author who  in France this June; and Kate Spade, a 55-year-old fashion designer and business woman who was found dead of suicide, also in June, in her New York City apartment.

Sports re-emerged in the No. 4 spot with the Colorado Avalanche. The Avalanche, who play home games at the Pepsi Center, had a 10-game win streak last season from Jan. 2-24 and made the playoffs after qualifying on the final last game of the regular season. The team is on pace to make the playoffs this season as well.

In the No. 6 spot, Denverites sought out the Marvel Comics superhero film “Black Panther.” The was more than $700 million, according to Box Office Mojo. The film grossed $1.3 billion worldwide.

Singer, song writer, actress Demi Lovato, who has , took the No. 7 spot. Lovato, who had a drug overdose in July and entered a rehab facility, has made a strong and healthy comeback, resurfacing on Instagram in November.

Mega Millions took No. 8. The biggest Mega Millions jackpot in history — $1.5 billion — has yet to be claimed after the winning ticket was sold in October in a South Carolina convenience store. Relax, the winner has 180 days from the draw date to claim the prize.

Hurricane Florence, a monstrous Category 4 storm with a 137-mph high wind, hit the Carolinas in September killing 53 people and causing $17.9 billion in damage. It landed at No. 9.

Round out the top 10 was Election Results. Colorado had the nation’s second-highest turnout rate in the 2018 midterm election, based on numbers from the secretary of state’s office and the Florida-based United States Elections Project. More than 2.5 million voters went to the polls.

Here are some of the terms Google says had the highest sustained spike in traffic compared to 2017, filtered for spam, repeat queries and adult keywords:

Denver searches

1. World Cup
2. Mac Miller
3. Anthony Bourdain
4. Colorado Avalanche
5. Kate Spade
6. Black Panther
7. Demi Lovato
8. Mega Million
9. Hurricane Florence
10. Election results

United States

Searches
1. World Cup
2. Hurricane Florence
3. Mac Miller
4. Kate Spade
5. Anthony Bourdain
6. Black Panther
7. Mega Millions results
8. Stan Lee
9. Demi Lovato
10. Election results

News
1. World Cup
2. Hurricane Florence
3. Mega Millions
4. Election results
5. Hurricane Michael
6. Kavanaugh confirmation
7. Florida shooting
8. Royal wedding
9. Olympic medal count
10. Government shutdown

People
1. Demi Lovato
2. Meghan Markle
3. Brett Kavanaugh
4. Logan Paul
5. Khloe Kardashian
6. Eminem
7. Urban Meyer
8. Ariana Grande
9. Rick Ross
10. Cardi B

Actors
1. Logan Paul
2. Bill Cosby
3. Sylvester Stallone
4. Pete Davidson
5. Michael B. Jordan
6. Allison Mack
7. Noah Centineo
8. Bradley Cooper
9. Roseanne Barr
10. Chadwick Boseman

Athletes
1. Tristan Thompson
2. Shaun White
3. Lindsey Vonn
4. Le’Veon Bell
5. Kawhi Leonard
6. Dez Bryant
7. Nick Foles
8. Chloe Kim
9. Naomi Osaka
10. Johnny Weir

Politicians
1. Stacey Abrams
2. Beto O’Rourke
3. Ted Cruz
4. Andrew Gillum
5. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
6. Nikki Haley
7. Lindsey Graham
8. Kyrsten Sinema
9. Nancy Pelosi
10. Susan Collins

Loss
1. Mac Miller
2. Kate Spade
3. Anthony Bourdain
4. Stan Lee
5. Aretha Franklin
6. XXXTentacion
7. Mollie Tibbetts
8. Avicii
9. Burt Reynolds
10. John McCain

Musicians and Bands
1. Demi Lovato
2. Eminem
3. Ariana Grande
4. Rick Ross
5. Cardi B
6. Travis Scott
7. Childish Gambino
8. Machine Gun Kelly
9. Meek Mill
10. Queen

Movies
1. Black Panther
2. Incredibles 2
3. Deadpool 2
4. Avengers: Infinity War
5. A Quiet Place
6. A Star Is Born
7. Bohemian Rhapsody
8. Venom
9. Hereditary
10. The Nun

Songs
1. Bohemian Rhapsody
2. This is America
3. Baby Shark
4. God’s Plan
5. Killshot
6. In My Feelings
7. Electric Slide
8. thank u, next
9. Mo Bamba
10. Lucid Dreams

TV Shows
1. Roseanne
2. Altered Carbon
3. The Haunting of Hill House
4. American Idol
5. Lost in Space
6. Corbra Kai
7. Castle Rock
8. Westworld
9. Insatiable
10. On My Block

Video games
1. Fortnite
2. Red Dead Redemption
3. Fallout 76
4. Far Cry 5
5. God of War
6. Monster Hunter: World
7. Sea of Thieves
8. Call of Duty: Black Ops 4
9. Kingdom Come: Deliverance
10. Zombs Royale

Professional Sports Teams
1. Cleveland Cavaliers
2. Boston Red Sox
3. Philadelphia Eagles
4. New York Yankees
5. Los Angeles Dodgers
6. Los Angeles Lakers
7. Boston Celtics
8. Cleveland Browns
9. Chicago Bears
10. Milwaukee Brewers

Soccer Teams
1. Mexico National Football Team
2. Brazil National Football Team
3. Germany National Football Team
4. Argentina National Football Team
5. Croatia National Football Team
6. England National Football Team
7. Belgium National Football Team
8. Russia National Football Team
9. France National Football Team
10. Portugal National Football Team

How to
1. How to vote
2. How to register to vote
3. How to play mega millions
4. How to buy ripple
5. How to turn off automatic updates
6. How to get the old snapchat back
7. How to play powerball
8. How to buy bitcoin
9. How to screen record
10. How to get boogie down emote

Where is…
1. Where is Villanova University
2. Where is Croatia
3. Where is Parkland Florida
4. Where is Hurricane Florence
5. Where is Hurricane Michael
6. Where is my polling place
7. Where is Pyeongchang
8. Where is Amazon based
9. Where is Paradise California
10. Where is Prince from

What is…?
1. What is bitcoin
2. What is racketeering
3. What is DACA
4. What is a government shutdown
5. What is Good Friday
6. What is Prince Harry’s last name
7. What is Fortnite
8. What is a duck boat
9. What is a yanny laurel
10. What is a nationalist

18. Who…?
1. Who won the Mega Millions
2. Who dies in Infinity War
3. Who won McGregor vs Khabib
4. Who won Logan or KSI
5. Who killed XXXTentacion
6. Who won the election
7. Who bit Beyonce
8. Who is Lil Tay
9. Who does Arie end up with
10. Who is Marshmello

19. GIFs
1. Fortnite GIF
2. Default Dance GIF
3. Dilly Dilly GIF
4. Orange Justice GIF
5. Black Panther GIF
6. Cat Curling GIF
7. Ugandan Knuckles GIF
8. Draymond Green GIF
9. Cardi B GIF
10. Floss Dance GIF

Fashion Searches
1. 1980s fashion
2. Grunge style
3. 1990s fashion
4. 2000s fashion
5. Meghan Markle
6. Men’s Fashion
7. Harajuku fashion
8. Hipster style
9. Kate Middleton
10. 80s mens fashion

Fashion Brands
1. Fashion Nova
2. Louis Vuitton
3. Versace
4. Givenchy
5. Gucci
6. Alexander McQueen
7. Dolce & Gabbana
8. Fashionphile
9. Dior
10. Moschino

Diet
1. Keto diet
2. Dubrow diet
3. Noom diet
4. Carnivore diet
5. Mediterranean diet
6. Optavia diet
7. Dr. Gundry diet
8. Fasting diet
9. Fodmap diet
10. The Shepherd’s Diet

Food
1. Unicorn cake
2. Romaine lettuce
3. CBD gummies
4. Keto pancakes
5. Keto cheesecake
6. Necco wafers
7. Keto cookies
8. Keto chili
9. Keto brownies
10. Gochujang sauce

Supercharged by abnormally warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the Category 4 storm crashed ashore in the early afternoon near Mexico Beach, a tourist town about midway along the Panhandle, a 200-mile (320-kilometer) stretch of white-sand beach resorts, fishing towns and military bases. After it ravaged the Panhandle, Michael barreled into south Georgia as a Category 3 hurricane — the most powerful ever recorded for that part of the neighboring state. It later weakened to a Category 1 hurricane, and there were reports it spawned possible tornadoes in central Georgia.

In north Florida, Michael battered the shoreline with sideways rain, powerful gusts and crashing waves, swamping streets and docks, flattening trees, shredding awnings and peeling away shingles. It set off transformer explosions and knocked out power to more than 388,000 homes and businesses.

A Panhandle man was killed by a tree that toppled on a home, Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Anglie Hightower said. But she added emergency crews trying to reach the home were hampered by downed trees and debris blocking roadways. The man wasn’t immediately identified.

Damage in Panama City was extensive, with broken and uprooted trees and power lines down nearly everywhere. Roofs were peeled off and homes split open by fallen trees. Twisted street signs lay on the ground. Residents emerged in the early evening to assess damage when rains stopped, though skies were still overcast and windy.

Vance Beu, 29, was staying with his mother at her apartment, Spring Gate Apartments, a small complex of single-story wood frame apartment buildings. A pine tree punched a hole in their roof and he said the roar of the storm sounded like a jet engine as the winds accelerated. Their ears even popped as the barometric pressure dropped.

“It was terrifying, honestly. There was a lot of noise. We thought the windows were going to break at any time. We had the inside windows kind of barricaded in with mattresses,” Beu said.

Kaylee O’Brien was crying as she sorted through the remains of the apartment she shared with three roommates at Whispering Pines apartments, where the smell of broken pine trees was thick in the air. Four pine trees had crashed through the roof of her apartment, nearly hitting two people. Her 1-year-old Siamese cat, Molly, was missing.

“We haven’t seen her since the tree hit the den. She’s my baby,” O’Brien said, her face wet with tears.

In Apalachicola, Sally Crown rode out the storm in her house. The worst damage — she thought — was in her yard. Multiple trees were down. But after the storm passed, she drove to check on the cafe she manages and saw breathtaking destruction.

“It’s absolutely horrendous. Catastrophic,” Crown said. “There’s flooding. Boats on the highway. A house on the highway. Houses that have been there forever are just shattered.”

Gov. Rick Scott announced soon after the powerful eye had swept inland that “aggressive” search and rescue efforts would get underway as conditions allowed. He urged people to stay off debris-littered roads.

“If you and your family made it through the storm safely, the worst thing you could do now is act foolishly,” he said.

Michael was a meteorological brute that sprang quickly from a weekend tropical depression, going from a Category 2 on Tuesday to a Category 4 by the time it came ashore. It was the most powerful hurricane on record to hit the Panhandle.

More than 375,000 people up and down the Gulf Coast were urged to evacuate as Michael closed in. But the fast-moving, fast-strengthening storm didn’t give people much time to prepare, and emergency authorities lamented that many ignored the warnings and seemed to think they could ride it out.

Diane Farris, 57, and her son walked to a high school-turned-shelter near their Panama City home, where about 1,100 people crammed into a space meant for about half as many. Neither she nor her son had any way to communicate because their lone cellphone got wet and quit working.

“I’m worried about my daughter and grandbaby. I don’t know where they are. You know, that’s hard,” she said, choking back tears.

In Panama City, plywood and metal flew off the front of a Holiday Inn Express. Part of the awning fell and shattered the glass front door of the hotel, and the rest of the awning wound up on vehicles parked below it.

“Oh my God, what are we seeing?” said evacuee Rachel Franklin, her mouth hanging open. The hotel swimming pool had whitecaps.

Hurricane-force winds extended up to 45 miles (72 kilometers) from Michael’s center at the height of the storm. Forecasters said rainfall could reach up to a foot (30 centimeters) in spots. And then there was the life-threatening storm surge.

A water-level station in Apalachicola, close to where Michael came ashore, reported a surge of nearly 8 feet (2.4 meters).

Based on its internal barometric pressure, Michael was the third most powerful hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland, behind the unnamed Labor Day storm of 1935 and Camille in 1969. Based on wind speed, it was the fourth-strongest, behind the Labor Day storm (184 mph, or 296 kph), Camille and Andrew in 1992.

Forecasters said it would unleash damaging wind and rain all the way into the Carolinas, which are still recovering from Hurricane Florence’s epic flooding.

At the White House, President Donald Trump said, “God bless everyone because it’s going to be a rough one,” he said. “A very dangerous one.” His office said he would tour the devastated areas next week.

In Mexico Beach, population 1,000, the storm shattered homes, leaving floating piles of lumber. The lead-gray water was so high that roofs were about all that could be seen of many homes.

Hours earlier, meteorologists watched satellite imagery in complete awe as the storm intensified.

“We are in new territory,” National Hurricane Center Meteorologist Dennis Feltgen wrote on Facebook. “The historical record, going back to 1851, finds no Category 4 hurricane ever hitting the Florida panhandle.”

The storm is likely to fire up the debate over global warming.

Scientists say global warming is responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme weather, such as storms, droughts, floods and fires. But without extensive study, they cannot directly link a single weather event to the changing climate.

And with Election Day less than a month away, the crisis was seen as a test of leadership for Scott, a Republican running for the Senate, and Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum , the Democratic nominee for governor. Just as Northern politicians are judged on how they handle snowstorms, their Southern counterparts are watched closely for how they deal with hurricanes.

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Associated Press writers Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg, Fla.; Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Freida Frisaro in Miami; Brendan Farrington in St. Marks, Fla.; Russ Bynum in Keaton Beach, Fla.; Jonathan Drew in Raleigh, North Carolina; and Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Md., contributed to this story.

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For the latest on Hurricane Michael, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes

The Federal Emergency Management Agency at 12:18 p.m. Wednesday. The nationwide test is the first of its kind for the program that will allow the president to contact tens of millions of people across the country.

Officials in Vail conducted a local test of the system in May, one of a handful of locations to do so. Denver emergency management staff also tested the system on Sept. 5, and they expected to reach about a million people.

The Vail test was a success and an opportunity to learn valuable lessons, said Jennifer Kirkland, 911 operations administrator at the town’s Public Safety Communications Center.

The test showed that not everyone in the designated area received the text. Kirkland was standing in the communications center in the middle of Vail when the message was sent. The phones of the people around her started to buzz and emit a loud blare.

“Everyone around me got the text, but I didn’t,” she said.

Others in town also didn’t get the message, she said, but the agency couldn’t determine why.

“There was nothing that we could pinpoint about why or why not you get the text,” she said.

Other recipients heard the tone but did not get the text, . A number of people outside of the test area also received the messages.

“It reached a majority of people, but for us the key finding was that it’s like any other tool — you can’t use it just by itself,” Kirkland said.

The nationwide text on Wednesday will have a header that reads “Presidential Alert” and a brief message about the test, according to FEMA. Phones that are not on silent will make the same tone as they do when they receive tornado warnings or an AMBER alert.

The test was originally scheduled for Sept. 20 but officials postponed it until Wednesday due to Hurricane Florence.

Here are some things to know before Wednesday’s test:

• No, you can’t opt out. While you can decide to no longer receive regional notifications, a 2006 law prohibits users from opting out of a presidential alert.
• A Presidential Alert has never been sent before. Text alerts have been sent for regional weather and other emergencies, but a president has never used the system to send a text to the entire country about an “emergency of national consequence.” The national system will be tested for the first time Wednesday.
• FEMA activates the alert. The president has to direct the agency to send an alert, but FEMA officials have to activate the message and send it out.
• Receiving the alert does not allow the government to know your location.

BLADENBORO, N.C. — Thousands of coastal residents remained on edge Sunday, told they may need to leave their homes because rivers are still rising more than a week after Hurricane Florence slammed into the Carolinas.

About 6,000 to 8,000 people in Georgetown County, South Carolina, were alerted to be prepared to evacuate ahead of a “record event” of up to 10 feet (3 meters) of flooding expected from heavy rains dumped by Florence, county spokeswoman Jackie Broach-Akers said. She said flooding is expected to begin Tuesday near parts of the Pee Dee and Waccamaw rivers and that people in potential flood zones should plan to leave their homes Monday.

The county’s emergency management director, Sam Hodge, said in a video message posted online that authorities are closely watching river gauges and law enforcement would be going door to door in any threatened areas.

“From boots on the ground to technology that we have, we are trying to be able to get the message out,” Hodge said in the video feed, advising people they shouldn’t await an official order to evacuate should they begin to feel unsafe.

In North Carolina, five river gauges were still at major flood stage and five others were at moderate flood stage, according to National Weather Service. The Cape Fear River was expected to crest and remain at flood stage through the early part of the week, and parts of Interstates 95 and 40 are expected to remain underwater for another week or more.

But floodwaters already receding on one stretch of Interstate 40 left thousands of rotting fish on the pavement for firefighters to clean up. Video showed firefighters blasting the dead fish off the highway with a fire hose in Pender County in eastern North Carolina. The local fire department posted online: “We can add ‘washing fish off of the interstate’ to the long list of interesting things firefighters get to experience.”

North Carolina Emergency Management Director Michael Sprayberry said that eastern counties continue to see major flooding, including areas along the Black, Lumber, Neuse and Cape Fear rivers.

“Florence continues to bring misery to North Carolina,” North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper said in a statement Sunday evening. He added that crews conducted about 350 rescues over the weekend and that travel remains treacherous in the southeastern area of his state. But he said National Guard members would be shifting next to more to door-to-door and air search wellness checks on people in still-flooded areas.

The storm has claimed at least 43 lives since slamming into the coast Sept. 14.

In Washington, Congress is starting to consider almost $1.7 billion in new money to aid recovery efforts from Florence. Lawmakers already are facing a deadline this week to fund the government before the start of the new budget year Oct. 1, and members of Congress are expected to try to act on the disaster relief along with separate legislation to fund the government.

The chairman of the House Appropriations Committee said the money would be available as grants to states to help rebuild housing and public works, and assist businesses as they recover from the storm. GOP Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey called that “a first round” and that lawmakers are ready to act quickly if the federal disaster relief agency also needs more money.

An economic research firm estimated that Florence has caused around $44 billion in damage and lost output, which would make it one of the top 10 costliest U.S. hurricanes. The top disaster, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, cost $192.2 billion in today’s dollars, while last year’s Hurricane Harvey cost $133.5 billion Moody’s Analytics estimates Florence has caused $40 billion in damage and $4 billion in lost economic output, though the company stressed that the estimate is preliminary.

In other developments, at least three wild horse herds survived Florence on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, but caretakers were still trying to account for one herd living on a hard-hit barrier island, the News & Observer reported Sunday. Staff members are planning to make trips to the island this week to check on the Shackleford Banks herd.

Elsewhere in North Carolina, state environmental officials also said they’re closely monitoring two sites where Florence’s floodwaters have inundated coal ash sites.

Waggoner and Robertson reported from Raleigh, North Carolina. Also contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina; Meg Kinnard in Galivants Ferry, South Carolina; Denise Lavoie in Richmond, Virginia; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama and Michael Biesecker in Washington.

His Toyota Prius was loaded with three cans of gasoline, first-aid supplies, snacks, cameras, binoculars. His phone was loaded with radar apps to track the storm. His destination was the eye of the hurricane, where he and a friend, Logan Kahle, hoped to witness something known as “fallout.”

Fallout, in this case, meant birds, lots of birds, and strange ones at that – seabirds on shore, shorebirds far inland, tropical birds way out of their range.

Hurricanes, with their high winds and ocean tracks, can be roller coasters for birds. Those caught in them are whipped around, and experts say many probably die of exhaustion. But some make it – either by getting stuck in the calm eye or by sheer luck – and then land far from their home habitats. Some passionate birders – the kind who keep detailed lists of species they spot – are there to greet them.

“It’s very exciting for birders when that happens,” said Walker Golder, the National Audubon Society’s program director of Atlantic Coast flyway strategy.

Storm-birding, or hurricane-birding, is not for the casual birdwatcher. It can involve getting very wet, and it sometimes involves risk. Hopping and Kahle, for example, retreated from an area 20 miles from the North Carolina coast when power lines started falling, then headed inland to Buckhorn Reservoir, east of Raleigh.

The eye seemed stuck offshore, but they had studied reports on websites including eBird of remarkable bird sightings during past hurricanes. They figured they would head to a reservoir where unusual birds had shown up during past storms. They slept in the car. On Saturday morning, after waves of various species of seabirds called terns showed up in front of them, Kahle shouted out, “Trindade petrel!”

The Trindade petrel is a dark-bodied, white-bellied seabird that breeds on islands hundreds of miles off Brazil and otherwise rarely touches land. But it roams the Atlantic and often hangs out over Gulf Stream waters off North Carolina. Only twice before, as far as Hopping knew, had it been recorded inland in North America, in 1996 and 1933.

On this morning, it “basically just materialized out of the sky” at Buckhorn Reservoir, Hopping recalled. His camera had broken, so he quickly used his phone to take photos through his spotting scope that “look like they were painted by Monet really far away.”

“Oh, it was really worth it,” said Hopping, a Cornell University junior studying environmental science and sustainability. “We were really lucky 
. It was shocking and so cool.”

Hurricanes affect birds in other ways. In the Carolinas, it’s possible that Florence damaged pine forests that species such as the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker depend on for nesting and foraging, Golder said. Hurricanes can submerge river islands where some seabirds nest, and erosion can prompt worried humans to harden shorelines, removing more habitat that migrating birds use as stopovers during long journeys south.

But there are upsides, Golder said. Some seabirds nest in sandy spots with sparse vegetation – the kind of habitat that washover from storms like Florence can make on barrier islands. In general, birds shelter as best they can, said Golder, who noted that migrant warblers were busily foraging in his Wilmington, North Carolina, backyard when the rains stopped, then retreated again – to where, he does not know – when they resumed their trip.

“Birds have been dealing with hurricanes for as long as there have been birds and hurricanes,” he said.

As for those sought-after birds displaced by storms? Unless they’re banded and tracked, their fate is unclear, Golder said. They probably try to follow rivers back to the ocean. But without their usual seafood diet, they might not have the energy to make it, he said.

“It’s tough being a bird,” said Nathan Gatto, the owner of Wright’s Backyard Birding Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “It’s always something you think about when you see a really lost bird.”

Gatto, 30, didn’t go straight into Florence to look for rarities, although he is the type of birder who has driven 19 hours each way to try – and fail – to spot a Ross’s gull that had been reported in New York. But when it came to a hurricane in his state, he said, he didn’t want to be that birder who got in trouble and required rescue.

Nevertheless, he spent six very rainy hours Saturday and eight sopping hours Sunday looking for birds at a lake near his city, outside the storm’s path. He was rewarded with several terns, including the second recorded royal tern in Wake County and “cool little shore birds” called red-necked phalaropes.

His birding gear, he noted, is waterproof. “We still got pretty wet,” Gatto said.

Of course, many people in the storm’s path got a lot more than wet. Florence dropped 8 trillion gallons of water onto North Carolina, leading to mass flooding and the storm-related deaths of at least 37 people in three states. Knowing that sort of devastation can happen means sightings come with mixed emotions, birders said.

“I know every birder in North Carolina had this sort of hope that it was going to come right over and mess some stuff up and bring some birds through, but you feel a little bad about it,” said Sam Jolly, 21, a North Carolina State University student who spotted a very rare arctic tern and other oceangoing birds at a lake southwest of Raleigh during the weekend.

“When birders are hoping for a storm, they want it to pass as a weak Category 1, or maybe a tropical storm,” said Jolly, adding that he was “not that hardcore” to want to head into the storm itself.

Hopping, a Colorado native who said he has loved birds since third grade and went to Cornell because of its renowned ornithology lab, previously traveled alone to South America to look for birds. But he and Kahle had never birded a hurricane before, and it didn’t take long to realize that it wasn’t wise to stay in the thick of it.

“Shingles were ripping off houses. Parts of rooms were ripping off. You could lean over at a 45 degree angle and just kind of hang into it,” he said of the winds closer to the coast on Friday. “Once power lines started going down 
 we got out of there.”

But the reservoir proved fruitful. There, according to his eBird checklist, he and Kahle saw 36 species, nearly one-third of which Hopping logged as “hurricane birds.”

“I don’t know if I would do the same thing again,” Hopping said of his storm-chasing. “But for a one-time thing, it was really awesome.”

PEMBROKE, N.C. — While walking door-to-door to make sure residents were evacuated along the swollen Lumber River, paramedic Fred Salazar of the Colorado Springs Fire Department talked about his job back home.

He recently went out on a call involving a 12-year-old boy, who Salazar’s family knew, who drowned in a swimming pool.

“It makes you feel guilty when you can’t save a child,” Salazar said. “Here I see a lot of people helping a lot of people
 and that makes me feel not as guilty.”

Salazar is part of Colorado Task Force 1, an urban search-and-rescue team based in Lakewood that is one of more than two dozen such units that operate under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Colorado group includes veterans who, like team safety manager John Bolger, deployed to New Orleans in the devastating aftermath of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

Colorado Task Force 1 deployed to Robeson County in North Carolina as Hurricane Florence worked its way toward land. Its members still aren’t sure when they will be able to return home.

After the hurricane made landfall Sept. 14 and eventually was downgraded to a tropical storm, the residents of Robeson County still felt its temper. It rained for days, there were tornado warnings and rivers overflowed their banks, isolating entire communities.

“It is not if it¶¶Òőap going to flood, it is when,” Steve Aseltine, the task force’s leader, said during a morning briefing before the storm affected the area surrounding Pembroke.

The first few days were all about logistics and setting up base camp at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Cots for the 45-member team were neatly arranged along a gym floor. Boxes on top of boxes of gear were labeled, stored and made ready for action. Then the waiting began. The team conducted drills, went over scenarios and talked water and boat safety, checking and rechecking gear before the hurricane made its way inland.

It was the night of Sept. 15 when the action got real. Several members of the squad who are trained for swift-water rescue worked throughout the night evacuating 123 people from rising floodwaters.

But not all of the jobs on the team are the type that get rescuers’ photos on the front page of the newspaper. Some work is behind the scenes.

Nick Grosch, for example, a fire captain with South Metro Fire Rescue in Englewood, is the team’s logistics manager, charged with making sure everything at the base of operation runs smoothly. One of his many jobs is to make sure there is food for the crew. There were a couple of days where peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast were followed by white bread with ham and cheese for lunch — and again for dinner.

“The guys really don’t know how good we have it,” Grosch said.

It’s that perspective that keeps people going in situations like this. It¶¶Òőap OK to celebrate the little things during a hurricane — like the success of filling your tank with gas after waiting almost two hours in line at a Shell station in Laurinburg, NC. You never know when the road back home may be flooded and closed.

“We can’t let our guard down for a second,” Aseltine told his team in that same early morning briefing. Hurricane Florence was like that — when you thought the fight was done, it punched again.

The men and women who comprise Colorado Task Force 1 are firefighters, paramedics, doctors, engineers and K-9 handlers. They have hard jobs back home in Colorado, and yet they signed up to do that work in even harder conditions in post-Florence North Carolina.