The boardwalk in the resort town of Destin, Florida, was nearly deserted on Tuesday, the shops and adjoining restaurants closed less than 24 hours before Hurricane Michael was set to slam into the stretch of Florida’s Gulf Coast famous for its white beaches.
Michael was to make landfall yesterday, likely a little further down the coast around Panama City Beach, a family-friendly resort town edged by white-sand beaches and dotted with hotel towers, mini-golf courses and oyster restaurants.
“The town is quieter than I have ever seen it,” Dan Rowe, president of the town’s marketing organization, Visit Panama City Beach, said in a telephone interview.
Photo: Reuters
Northwest Florida as a region attracted nearly 17 million visitors in 2016, or 15 percent of total tourists in the state, according to Visit Florida, the state’s tourism marketing arm.
Panama City Beach is primarily a summer destination, but was emptier than usual for an October afternoon, Rowe said, with many local restaurants closed up for the storm, and journalists and camera crews among the few customers at hotels that were staying open.
Michael was forecast to be the most powerful hurricane to hit Florida’s Panhandle in a decade.
After past hurricanes eroded the town’s photogenic beaches, millions of US dollars were spent replenishing and raising them.
Officials two years ago spent US$14 million to add about 688,000m3 of sand dredged up from the ocean floor, Rowe said.
Sand dunes, which provide a natural barrier to beach erosion and flooding, have been restored and strengthened with sea oats, a tall native grass.
“We have been through big storms before and we have rebuilt,” Rowe said.
Depending on the scale of cleanup efforts, officials would decide later in the week whether to cancel Oktoberfest, a celebration of craft beer scheduled for this weekend.
In Tallahassee, the state capital about 40km inland from the Gulf Coast, hotels were filling up with some of the residents who followed evacuation orders issued in at least 20 counties, Visit Tallahassee senior marketing director Gary Stogner said.
“We’re a bit inland and out of the fray,” Stogner said, adding that he still expected high winds to pummel the city.
He worried about the city’s famous southern live oaks draped in Spanish moss and predicted not all of them would survive.
Telephones in tourist businesses across the region rang unanswered, or redirected to voicemail messages saying they would be closed for the storm.
“Be safe, mariners,” said the recording greeting callers to the Panama City Marina.
At a Tallahassee hotel, Lou Bassett was trying to make the most of having his family’s beach vacation in Cape San Blas abruptly curtailed as he unloaded sandy strollers and luggage from his car while one of his sons looked on grumpily.
His wife and two sons, along with his sister and her baby, had managed to get in a couple of days on the beach before having to weigh whether to follow a mandatory evacuation order.
“There were people ignoring it,” Basset, a 47-year-old sales manager from Atlanta, Georgia, said. “But the fire chief was leaving town, so that was a pretty good indication that we should get out of there.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not