‘Hurricane Hunter’ Flies Over Florence, Reveals Scary Footage

Hurricane Florence is shaping up to be a historic natural disaster, and on Monday, NOAA Hurricane Hunters flew over the system to capture the reality of the situation.

Hurricane Hunters’ Paul Flaherty, the crew’s flight director and meteorologist, appeared on CNN on Monday, not long after Florence was upgraded to a category 4 storm. He testified to the strength of Florence, and urged residents not to underestimate it. Flaherty and his crew flew over Florence for three days in a row, noting that each time it intensified rapidly.

“People need to know about the forecast of this thing coming into the U.S. as a major category 4 — potentially category 5 — storm is extremely important,” he said. “They need to be paying attention.”

As Flaherty and the news anchor spoke, they played footage from the last several flights over the storm, consisting mostly of a massive bird’s eye view of the swirling clouds. Flaherty did his best to describe how he and his colleagues could tell that the storm was growing stronger, and where it stands relative to other major hurricanes.

“We were watching it develop, and you just have that kind of sick filling in your gut,” he said ominously. “We went through this with Irma in Florida last year. Of course, in the last couple of years everyone on the East Coast has been worried about one storm or another… We don’t like what we’re seeing, and I don’t think you guys like much of what you’re seeing on the ground either.”

Flaherty urged viewers to “get out of the way” of the storm, though at the time no formal evacuation order had been given. On Tuesday, the governers of South Carolina, North Carolina and Virgina all ordered mandatory evacuations. However, only about 50 percent of people typically follow such orders, according to a report on CBS This Morning on Tuesday. The chief administrator of FEMA begged the people off the south east to heed those warnings and find a safe facility to wait out the onslaught.

“We’re really hoping that people will heed the governors’ warnings in South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia today,” he said, “and make sure you’re taking the proper precautions to get out of storm surge areas and into facilities that can withstand the winds.”

Nearly 1 million people fall under evacuation orders. Florence is expected to make landfall on Thursday morning, and may linger for quite a while.