About
Hurricane Florence was a powerful and long-lived Cape Verde hurricane, as well as the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the Carolinas and the ninth-wettest tropical cyclone to affect the contiguous United States. The sixth named storm, third hurricane, and the first major hurricane of the 2018 Atlantic hurricane season, Florence originated from a strong tropical wave that emerged off the west coast of Africa on August 30, 2018. By the evening of September 13, Florence had been downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane, though the storm began to stall as it neared the Carolina coastline. Early the next day on September 14, Florence made landfall just south of Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and weakened further as it slowly moved inland. With the threat of a major impact in the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic United States becoming evident by September 7, the governors of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Maryland, and the mayor of Washington, D.C. declared a state of emergency. On September 10 and September 11, the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia all issued mandatory evacuation orders for some of their coastal communities, as it was expected that emergency management personnel would be unable to reach people in those areas once the storm arrived.