Hurricane Michael rapidly gained strength in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico Tuesday night and continued to intensify Wednesday morning, threatening to become the most intense hurricane on record to strike the Florida Panhandle. The dangerous Category 4 hurricane has winds up to 145 mph, and is predicted to make landfall Wednesday afternoon.

Residents of northwest Florida had until early Tuesday to leave their homes ahead of Hurricane Michael, forecast to crash ashore midweek as a major Category 3 storm with "life-threatening" flash flooding possible.

In the exact spot where Hurricane Katrina demolished the Plaquemines Parish Detention Center, a new $105 million jail now hovers 19 feet above the marsh, perched atop towering concrete pillars. Described by a state official as the “Taj Mahal” of Louisiana corrections, it has so much space that one of every 27 parish residents could bunk there.

To many homeowners, home insurance is just another bill to pay. But when disasters happen, this extra layer of protection can serve as your lifeboat—and simultaneously, your worst nightmare.

The Travelers Companies, a major national insurer, has made an undisclosed but apparently substantial investment in drone operations software company Kittyhawk. The investment strengthens a partnership between Kittyhawk and Travelers and signals a deepening reliance on drones to assess property claims in the insurance industry, particularly after natural disasters.

Despite the monster storms this hurricane season and in 2017, Katrina remains No. 1 on the list of costliest hurricanes. But a twist on the list, with today’s population calculated into historic storms, puts a Florida storm in the top spot, with Katrina at No. 3 and Florida storms otherwise dominating.

Although 2017 — fraught with catastrophic incidents — was one of the costliest years on record for the global insurance industry, Aon’s new report has found that insurers’ capacity to meet their losses continues to grow.

Many home and business owners in the Pee Dee are filing insurance claims to help pay for the damage that Hurricane Florence left behind. One of those businesses is Latta Feeding Farms. The owner, Jamie Deaver, says it wasn’t floodwaters that damaged his store, it was the wind.

Earthquakes are among the most devastating and economically destructive natural disasters, with the 1994 Northridge earthquake still ranking as the fifth-costliest disaster in U.S. history. Yet unlike other common perils such as floods, fires and windstorms, the overwhelming majority of earthquake risk in the U.S. is completely uninsured.

Now that Hurricane Florence has pummeled the southeastern coastline with dozens of inches of rain, lashing winds, and flooded rivers, homeowners and insurers are scrambling to survey the damage to properties.

As many as 8,000 people in and around the city of Georgetown, South Carolina, have been urged to evacuate ahead severe flooding expected this week from two rain-gorged rivers in what may be the final destructive chapter of Hurricane Florence.

Residents in Georgetown County, South Carolina, where five rivers flow into the ocean, will prepare on Friday for a deluge of water in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, which has killed more than 40 people.

In the days following Hurricane Florence’s assault on the south-eastern coast of the US, some experts are already predicting $2.5 billion in insured losses. However, this wasn’t the season’s first severe storm — Lane hit Hawaii just a few weeks before and while the devastation wasn’t as significant on the island, the hurricane did outpace Florence in some metrics.

North Carolina estimated on Tuesday that 3.4 million poultry birds and 5,500 hogs died in Hurricane Florence, exceeding the number killed in the state’s last major hurricane two years ago.

From 1 to 5, the numbers we use to categorize hurricanes are ingrained in the minds of millions of Americans from Texas to Maine. But the famed 47-year-old Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, which only measures wind speed, may not be the best way to gauge a storm’s ferocity.