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At least 11 people have died from Hurricane Michael, which slammed into Florida’s Panhandle with 155-mph winds on Wednesday. The storm hacked a trail of catastrophic destruction in Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia before finally heading back out over water.

Five deaths were reported in Virginia, in addition to four in Florida, one in Georgia and one in North Carolina.

More than a million people are without electricity, and areas along the Gulf Coast and elsewhere report severe outages of cellphone service and other communications. As Michael moved through the Mid-Atlantic on Thursday and overnight, flash flood warnings were sent to people in towns from the coast to the slopes of the Appalachian Mountains.

As of noon ET Friday, the storm had left nearly 439,000 accounts without power outages in North Carolina, the state’s Emergency Management Agency said. Around the same time, Virginia’s emergency agency said more than 446,000 customers had no electricity. Those numbers are added to nearly 345,000 accounts without power in Florida and 150,000 in Georgia.

Six Florida counties remain under curfews, as work crews try to push debris off of roads so utility and emergency crews can start to repair the damage and reach people who need help after one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S.

As one Panama City, Fla., resident told NPR’s Debbie Elliott, “This whole town’s destroyed.”

In Georgia, some of the worst damage hit the southwestern section of the state, where it devastated farms at a particularly vulnerable time of the year.

“Hurricane Michael arrived before most of the state farmers had started harvest for the season — specifically for pecans, peanuts and cotton,” Tasnim Shamma reports from Atlanta member station WABE, for NPR’s Newscast unit.

“It is our worst dream being realized,” Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black said. “I have seen cotton that was being harvested yesterday. It was an outstanding yield of three bales an acre. You cannot tell where he stopped harvest and where the rest of it was being harvested by the storm.”

More than 50 poultry houses were also destroyed, officials say.

Even with the worst of the storm now past, flooding remains a threat, as overwhelmed river systems struggle to cope with massive amounts of water.

Of the five deaths in Virginia, four were from drowning, according to member station WVTF. It adds that Hanover County firefighter Lt. Brad Clark was killed and several others were injured when a tractor trailer rear-ended a fire truck that was stopped at a crash site.

In Virginia, the National Weather Service said on Friday, “significant river flooding is occurring or forecast on the Appomattox River and possibly even on the lower James River.” (Excerpts from NPR, reporting by Bill Chappell.)

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