Hurricane Florence causes weatherman to evacuate during live TV coverage

A North Carolina meteorologist reporting on Hurricane Florence was forced to abandon his live broadcast mid-sentence — just as his building began to flood, video shows.

The Category 1 hurricane began to throttle the Carolinas Thursday with a heavy storm surge that burst inland, causing major flooding in New Bern, N.C., where WCTI, the city’s ABC affiliate, is located, The Weather Channel reported.

The station was forced to evacuate its staff — save for two intrepid meteorologists who stayed behind and continued to broadcast.

“We have the situation here that has developed at the station, and that is of the water getting [so] close to the building that the building has been evacuated,” said the station’s chief meterologist, Donnie Cox, standing alongside weatherman Shane Hinton, in a video posted to Twitter Thursday night. “Just so you know that we are staying here to keep you up to date.”

In a second video, Cox, who was now by himself, announced that a sister station in Myrtle Beach would take over the weather coverage. Then he abruptly walked out of the frame mid-broadcast, leaving a radar loop of the hurricane playing in the background.

“So that really did just happen,” Jaime McCutcheon, one of the station’s anchors, tweeted. “The water started rising and we evacuated almost an entire TV station in about 15 minutes.

“Little rough, but we’re all out,” the station tweeted around 9 p.m. Thursday.

The city of New Bern, with a population of around 30,000, is under a mandatory evacuation, according to The Weather Channel. The hurricane made landfall Friday morning.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.