Hurricane Matthew scraped Florida's Atlantic coast early Friday, toppling trees onto homes and knocking out power to more than a half-million people but sparing some of the most heavily populated stretches of shoreline the catastrophic blow many had feared.
Irondequoit resident Maggie Schweinberger was shuttered inside the home of her sister in Deerfield Beach, Florida Thursday night.
"It got back up to a cat 4 when it was coming this way; that was 130 mph winds, so we were quite concerned, and we stocked up on food, and water, and batteries," she said.
But the community north of Fort Lauderdale escaped any serious damage.
"Never lost power; never lost the phones. It was just like a bad storm, but that was it; nothing serious at all."
Schweinberger says life has returned to normal in her sister's neighborhood. People are out driving and walking and the shopping malls are open.
Alicia Luyre recently relocated from Rochester to West Palm Beach, Florida.
Her home never lost power, and aside from some downed trees, there does not appear to be any significant damage in the neighborhood.
"We had those microbursts right outside my door where it got incredibly windy - probably 80 or 90 miles an hour or more - we did see that; we had the outer wall of the storm," Luyre said.
She lives six or seven miles west of the mandatory evacuation areas and Luyre said she feels fortunate to have escaped the full force of the hurricane.
As of noon on Friday, Matthew remained a category 3 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 120 miles per hour as slowly traveled north up the east coast of Florida.
Authorities warned that the danger was far from over, with hundreds of miles of coastline in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina still under threat of torrential rain and dangerous storm surge as the most powerful hurricane to menace the Atlantic Seaboard in over a decade pushed north. They warned, too, that the storm could still take a turn inland.
