Hurricane Matthew Advisory: When And Where Tropical Storm Will Hit Through Sunday [VIDEO]
Hurricane Matthew is continuing to impact the Southeast, gradually making its way up the coast.
With 120 mph winds, Hurricane Matthew is not a storm to be taken lightly. The death toll in Haiti continues to rise exponentially, with Reuters now reporting at least 572 deaths as of Friday. The hurricane is now moving up the Southeast coast, currently impacting northeast Florida, where it will stay through Friday night.
The Georgia coast will see the impact of the storm from Friday evening until Saturday morning, at which point it will head through South Carolina, through Saturday night. Then, the southern part of North Carolina is expected to feel the impact from Saturday afternoon through Sunday morning.
Various counties have been given evacuation orders already, including much of Florida. Check to see if you're in any evacuation zones.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has expressed the seriousness of these evacuation orders, saying at a Thursday press conference, "It is getting worse, and we're seeing that it's getting worse ... There is no excuse to risk your life. There's no excuse to risk the lives of your family members."
President Barack Obama expressed similar seriousness in his own statement, made after his meeting with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
"Many of you will remember Hurricane Sandy where initially people thought this doesn't look as bad as we thought and then suddenly you get massive storm surge and a lot of people were severely affected," President Obama said. "We're still on the front end of this hurricane, we're not on the backend. So we don't know how bad the damage could end up, we don't know how severe the storm surge could end up being. And we're not going to know for 3, 4, 5 days what the ultimate effects of this are."
He noted that "storm surge", ocean water that pushes inland during a hurricane, can move at a very quick pace. "If they are telling you to evacuate, you need to get out of there and move to higher ground."
