4 AM: Hurricane Sally making landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama

Hurricane Sally has made landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama, as a Category 2 storm, bringing torrential rain over a coastal storm surge that forecasters said would cause dangerous flooding from the Florida Panhandle to Mississippi and well inland in the days ahead.

The slow-moving hurricane finally came ashore with top winds of 105 mph (165 kmh), the National Hurricane Center said.

Some 150,000 homes and businesses had lost electricity by early Wednesday, according to the poweroutage.us site. A curfew was called in the coastal Alabama city of Gulf Shores due to life-threatening conditions. In the Panhandle's Escambia County, Chief Sheriff's Deputy Chip Simmons vowed to keep deputies out with residents as long as physically possible. The county includes Pensacola, one of the largest cities on the Gulf Coast.

“The sheriff’s office will be there until we can no longer safely be out there, and then and only then will we pull our deputies in,” Simmons said at a storm briefing late Tuesday.

This for a storm that, during the weekend, appeared to be headed for New Orleans. “Obviously this shows what we’ve known for a long time with storms – they are unpredictable,” Pensacola Mayor Grover Robinson IV said.

Видео 4 AM: Hurricane Sally making landfall near Gulf Shores, Alabama канала WWLTV