Officials urged residents along Florida’s east coast to rush emergency preparations to completion late on Wednesday as deadly Hurricane Matthew, one of the most powerful storms in recent history, bore down on the state from the Caribbean and threatened a direct hit. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuating from vulnerable coastal areas ranging from Fort Lauderdale north to Cape Canaveral as the category 3 storm, which claimed at least 16 lives as it passed across Haiti and the Dominican Republic on Tuesday, drew closer.

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