(task) Scenes From Hurricane Matthew’s Capricious Path - The New York Times

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Hurricane Emergency Management

> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/us/scenes-from-hurricane-matthews-capricious-path.html?ribbon-ad-idx=11&rref=homepage&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Home%20Page&pgtype=article <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/us/scenes-from-hurricane-matthews-capricious-path.html?ribbon-ad-idx=11&rref=homepage&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Home%20Page&pgtype=article>
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> Scenes From Hurricane Matthew’s Capricious Path
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> A man repairing his roof on Friday after it was ripped away by Hurricane Matthew in Jérémie, Haiti. Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated Press
> It was first noticed as a bit of meteorological arcana. An alert from the National Hurricane Center <http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/xgtwo/gtwo_archive.php?current_issuance=201609222341&basin=atl&fdays=5>at 2 p.m. on Sept. 22 noted that a tropical wave had been detected moving off the west coast of Africa but gave it little likelihood of developing into a major storm.
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> Still, develop it did, becoming a textbook example of how storms follow no textbook. It then mushroomed into the strongest hurricane in the Atlantic since Hurricane Felix in 2007, killing, by some estimates, more than 800 people in Haiti, <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/world/americas/haiti-hurricane-matthew.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news>slamming into the Bahamas and then skirting a razor’s edge that, had it been a few miles south and west, could have caused catastrophic damage in Florida.
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> By Saturday, it was barely a hurricane, with maximum sustained winds of 75 miles per hour, but it still had the potential to bring heavy rain and flooding to the Carolinas.
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> Dieulifaite Derlus, Maria Ageeb, Ed Kelley and Todd Neville had nothing in common — until the storm hit, leaving behind stories of disaster and disaster narrowly averted. Here are some of them.
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> Oct. 8-10, in inches
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> Hurricane Matthew
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> TURKS AND
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> CAICOS
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> Les Cayes, Haiti
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> His family safe, Mr. Derlus carefully retraced his steps atop the back wall behind his home on Tuesday, making one final trip to save a few valuables. But the wind was too strong, knocking him off the ledge and into the rush of muddy water below.
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> After drying them in the sun, a young girl on Friday gathered family photographs that had been soaked by Hurricane Matthew in Jérémie, Haiti. Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated Press
> Before he could get up, the wall fell, too, unable to withstand the 145-m.p.h. gusts. It toppled right on top of him.
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> Neighbors spotted Mr. Derlus, 62, and carried him, semiconscious, from hospital to hospital. Each one turned him away. There were no doctors to help. As he approached the third hospital, he died in the neighbors’ arms.
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> “He was the pillar of our family,” said Maude Levius, his wife, holed up with their five children in the one room of the house that was not destroyed.
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> They don’t know where they will bury him, or how they will pay for it. Their furniture, clothes and other possessions were washed away in the storm.
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> “We have no idea what we’re going to do now,” Ms. Levius, 56, said. Mr. Derlus was the family’s sole bread winner, his job as a driver for a government agency providing for all seven of them. “I don’t know how God will provide for us.”
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> Roof repairs being carried out on Friday after Hurricane Matthew hit the South Beach area near Nassau, the Bahamas. Carlo Allegri/Reuters
> Nassau, the Bahamas
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> When the shingles started popping off the roof and she realized she could not make it to the main house, Ms. Ageeb thought she knew where she would be safe — in the bathroom of the two-story apartment where she lived behind the house where she and her three brothers had grown up.
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> Ms. Ageeb, 34, a lawyer, recalled what happened next on Thursday around 11 a.m. as the peak of the storm’s fury was hitting.
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> “Suddenly, half of the ceiling just lifted up and blew right off,” she said. “Luckily, I had already packed my passport and valuables in a backpack, just in case. All I had to do was grab it and go.”
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> She fought her way down the external stairs in the middle of winds nearing 140 m.p.h. and was sure at one point that she would be blown away.
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> “The wind started pushing me from side to side,” she said. “It almost pulled my glasses off my face and I stumbled, trying to grab hold of them, because without them, I’m blind. I made it to the bottom, and my brothers helped me.”
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> Members of the United Fellowship Ministries International Church held an impromptu prayer service on Friday in the remains of their church after the storm swept through South Beach near Nassau, the Bahamas. Carlo Allegri/Reuters
> From their house, they watched as the other half of the roof was blown away and everything she owned was exposed to the storm.
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> Ms. Ageeb’s home is one of many that were badly damaged in the area.
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> Homes, shops and service stations lost roofs and windows, sea walls collapsed and several areas were severe flooded. There has been no official report of the extent of the damage.
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> Ms. Ageeb captured the aftermath on a video.
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> “I can’t stop shaking,’’ she said. “I’m still a nervous wreck. I just want this to stop so we can just get on with cleaning up and trying to see what we can salvage.”
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> “Our country, this island, is going to need a lot of help,” Ms. Ageeb added. “We’ve always helped all the other islands, and I think this time now we’re definitely going to need help. I don’t know from who or from where, but we’re definitely going to need help.”
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> Ormond Beach, Fla.
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> The authorities in Volusia County were urging people to evacuate from their beachfront communities. The storm was lurking, threatening, frightening. But for a time, Mr. Kelley, the mayor of Ormond Beach, had no plans to leave.
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> Joe Lovece surveyed the damage to his oceanfront home in Ormond Beach, Fla., on Friday after Hurricane Matthew pounded the state. Phelan Ebenhack/Reuters
> “Originally, we weren’t going to board it up,” Mr. Kelley said of his home, which is a few miles inland and not far from Daytona Beach, the typically sun-soaked stock car racing hub. “We just thought we’d take a chance.”
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> But Mr. Kelley ultimately had a realization, pushed along by the demands of his children: Maybe, as a local government official, he should follow the recommendations of a local government.
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> “Why are we telling people to leave? Because it’s dangerous,” Mr. Kelley said. “When did you decide? When you start thinking: ‘Well, we’re telling everybody else to leave. Why am I here?’”
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> So, he concluded, “We actually heeded the advice that was given by us and others.”
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> By the time Mr. Kelley left the city on Thursday, he said that he had also recognized that the storm might leave him out of reach at a perilous moment for Ormond Beach, a city of about 41,000 where the oil <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/energy-environment/oil-petroleum-and-gasoline/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> tycoon John D. Rockefeller used to spend winters.
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> “I don’t know what I was going to do staying there because we knew, absolutely, that we were going to lose power,” Mr. Kelley said in an interview from Gainesville, where he had taken refuge and, by Friday afternoon, acknowledged that an evacuation had been a wise choice.
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> Waves from Hurricane Matthew crashing against a bridge in St. Augustine, Fla., on Friday. John Bazemore/Associated Press
> “The preparations were done,” he said. “There was no decision that I would have had to make that couldn’t have been from here.”
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> St. Augustine, Fla.
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> Mr. Neville, an accountant in St. Augustine, watched the damage unfold. As water rushed into his city, he glimpsed a partly submerged white sport utility vehicle. He listened as the palm trees twisted and as the rain pounded a roof.
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> But Mr. Neville was nowhere near St. Augustine. Instead, from a haven on the other side of the state, he used his cellphone to watch the ravaging of a 451-year-old city in real time.
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> It is one way technology is taking at least some of the uncertainty out of disastrous storms. You cannot control the weather, but you can see its damage even when you’re elsewhere.
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> Mr. Neville’s ability to keep watch on St. Augustine was born of gadgetry and fraternity: The images that poured onto his cellphone often came from surveillance cameras that he and other members of his regular Friday morning breakfast group at Georgie’s Diner had installed at their homes and offices.
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> Residents took shelter at Pedro Menendez High School in St. Augustine, Fla., on Thursday. Jewel Samad/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
> On the Friday morning when Hurricane Matthew passed about 30 miles from St. Augustine, Mr. Neville was safe and dry near Tampa.
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> The updates still flowed. There was the panning video from a jeweler that showed nature’s disconcerting powers, and an image from a friend named Chris that showed the floodwaters rising around the pumps of a Shell gas station that shares a parking lot with Georgie’s.
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> Yet Mr. Neville said he knew the destruction could have been far worse in a city that was the capital of Florida before it was a state. It would have been worse, Mr. Neville knew, had some forecasts held and the storm edged any closer to land.
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> “I remember looking at the 5 a.m. update and thinking, ‘Thank goodness it’s 35 miles offshore,’” Mr. Neville said. “Until that 5 a.m. update, for the last three days, we’ve had the bull’s-eye on us.”
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> St. Augustine is a city accustomed to storms and floodwaters: St. Johns County, of which St. Augustine is the seat, notes on its website that residents are reminded annually “of the vulnerability of our coastal community.” But Hurricane Matthew’s timing was especially worrisome.
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> “It hit St. Augustine right at high tide,” Mr. Neville said. “During a full-moon high tide, we’ll get minor flooding just from that. And then you throw in a nine-foot storm surge, and it’s unbelievable.”
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> But technology has its limits. As the storm reached peak intensity on Friday, the power went out and the battery backups blinked off. As night fell across Florida on Friday, Mr. Neville’s surveillance camera had not switched on again.