President Obama has canceled his Wednesday trip to Florida because of Hurricane Matthew.
Obama was scheduled to visit Tampa and Miami to discuss the Affordable Care Act and campaign for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but the storm’s growing intensity and the Sunshine State’s position in its path are forcing Obama to postpone the trip, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Tuesday.
“We are hoping to be able to reschedule those events relatively soon but that will be determined by the impact of the storm and by other components of the president’s schedule,” Earnest said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is establishing emergency centers in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas as Hurricane Matthew has already made landfall in Haiti.
Additionally, FEMA regional response coordination centers in Atlanta and Philadelphia and the national response coordination center in Washington will operate 24 hours a day starting Thursday.
“[W]e encourage everyone in potentially affected areas from Florida up through the mid-Atlantic to begin taking steps to prepare,” Earnest said.
The U.S. is deploying disaster response teams to the Bahamas, Haiti and Jamaica and has sent emergency supplies to those countries, which have limited internal capabilities to handle storms of this magnitude, Earnest said.
Those nations “don’t have significant modern infrastructure and this is one of the strongest storms to come along in several decades, at least in this part of the world,” he said.
