Holy crap! No good.

This storm was no joke! News said by pressure it was the 2nd most powerful storm in history to hit mainland US, by wind speed it was 4th. The state of Florida wasn't really stressing about it until it spooled up and took aim. The area hit is NOT like S. Florida where things are built to hurricane standards. The panhandle has lots of old wood frame stuff, flooding will surely be an issue and then it rolls right into GA.

What sucks is this is hitting right as their snowbird winter season is starting. Lots of people will have miserable holidays due to no work, no money, lots of damage.

This was the before pic:
https://www.legendarymarine.com/pana...h-location.htm

that pic is a good shot. on weather.com there is a video of it at the end and there is not much left. this is why I dont trust forecasters. Florence was supposed to be a cat 4 or 5 and hit at a cat 1. this one was supposed to be a cat 3 at the worst and it is one of the strongest to ever hit the US. this is why you should evacuate if you are on the coast. there is nothing you are going to do to protect anything when something like this hits. no matter how tough you think you are, nature always wins.

I know the area well there off of Thomas Drive. What a shame. Could have been way worse though in PCB. Much more damage just to the East.

My daughter lives in Walton County just north of the bay in Freeport, FL about 45 miles west of Panama City and she decided to stay so I came down to Tuesday to help her recover from what ever the storm left behind, Wednesday morning as the storm approached Cat 5 wind speeds we left for a local shelter at a nearby High School. The communities along the beach in Walton County appeared to have been spared significant damage from what we can see but local new reports show massive damage in Panama City and complete devastation in the Mexico Beach area. Its going to be a sometime before those areas are back to normal.

I used to work with real meteorologists, not the TV people. They live for events like Michael. They are not as much forecasters as they are students of why stuff happens. They always said "you can't learn much from a sunny day". Their focus was mostly wind-based although snow loading was a thing as well. I got to watch them really closely and I will tell you that the serious question for them is why this storm turned into something that didn't "seem" probable. I also worked with geologists that were earthquake focused and explosives people who studied what makes an explosion able to create damage. All of these guys were multiple PHDs in their fields plus mathematics/computer science. The wind people are not getting much sleep right now