Gianrigo Marletta, with Leila Macor – September 17, 2020
Shellshocked residents were cleaning up on Thursday after Hurricane Sally left a trail of destruction in US coastal towns stretching from Alabama to the top of the Florida panhandle.
Sally, which made landfall Wednesday as a Category 2 hurricane, turned streets into rivers, toppled trees and downed power lines.
“Our house had windows blow out,” Matt Wilson of Orange Beach, Alabama, one of the worst hit towns, told WPMI TV. “The whole house was shaking like a boat on the water.
“It was scary, man, it really was.”
Lieutenant Trent Johnson of the Orange Beach Police Department told AFP there had been one death in the city.
More than 400,000 homes and businesses in Alabama and Florida were still without power on Thursday, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.
Some of the worst reported flooding occurred in the city of Pensacola, Florida, which has a population of around 52,000.
Downtown streets resembled lakes at the height of the storm with cars submerged to the tops of their wheels and ferocious winds whipping up whitecaps.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was to visit Pensacola on Thursday to survey the damage, which included a missing section of a major new bridge across Pensacola Bay.
A 7:00 pm to 6:00 am curfew was imposed in Pensacola and surrounding counties.
Wilson, the Orange Beach resident, said his house had suffered severe damage and his family fled their home at the height of the storm.
“Everything on the ground floor is gone,” he told WPMI. “We ended up leaving the house during the eye of the storm… and waded through about five foot of water to our neighbor’s house arm in arm.”