Category 4 Hurricane Florence is preparing to make landfall in the Carolinas by Friday morning, and early estimations show that over 750,000 homes could be affected by the storm, making the budgets for anticipated reconstruction climb to 170 billion.
A potential 15ft storm surge paired with the nearly 50 inches of rain that is predicted with this storm, and the Carolinas and their surrounding barrier islands are set to be hit directly by it. More than a million people have already been evacuated, but there is a high chance that once these people return once the storm is over, they won’t know what they are coming back to.
Jeff Byard, the FEMA associate administrator, has this to say about the storm and their preparation for it. “This will be a storm that creates and causes massive damage to our country. This is not going to be a storm that we recover from in days.”