Water gushes through Florida streets after Hurricane Helene
Police and emergency workers waded through deep water to help people trapped by flooding in Fort Myers and Treasure Island, Fl
Helene weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early Friday after making landfall in northwestern Florida as a hurricane, bringing “nightmare” storm surge and dangerous winds and rain across much of the southeastern U.S. There were at least three storm-related deaths.
The storm, packing maximum sustained winds of 95 km/h, was about 60 kilometres south-southwest of Clemson, S.C., and about 130 kilometres east-northwest of Atlanta, moving north at 48 km/h at 8 a.m. ET.
“We expect it to weaken further. It’s going to turn northward and turn northwestward and eventually move into Tennessee and Kentucky, and merge with a funnel system up in that area,” said Jack Beven, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center.
The National Hurricane Center said Helene roared ashore around 11:10 p.m. ET Thursday near the mouth of the Aucilla River in the Big Bend area of Florida’s Gulf Coast. It had maximum sustained winds estimated at 225 km/h.
Video on social media sites showed sheets of rain coming down in Perry, Fla., near where Helene made landfall, and siding being torn off buildings. One local news station showed a home that had flipped over. The community and much of surrounding Taylor County were without power.
In Citrus County, some 193 kilometres south of Perry, first responders were out in boats early Friday to rescue people trapped by the flooding.
“If you are trapped and need help please call for rescuers – DO NOT TRY TO TREAD FLOODWATERS YOURSELF,” the sheriff’s office warned in a Facebook post. The water may contain live wires, sewage, sharp objects and other debris, they posted.
WATCH l Dramatic rescue off Florida’s southwest coast:
Man and dog rescued from sailboat as hurricane hits coast
The U.S. Coast Guard on Friday released video showing the rescue of a man whose boat was taking on water off Sanibel Island in Florida. The coast guard said in a post online that the rescue happened Thursday during Hurricane Helene.
Hunkering down at shelters
The hurricane’s eye passed near Valdosta, Ga., as the storm churned rapidly north into Georgia on Thursday night. The NHC issued an extreme wind warning for the area, meaning possible hurricane-force winds exceeding 185 km/h. At a hotel in the city of 55,000, dozens of people huddled in the darkened lobby after midnight Friday as winds whistled and howled outside.
Electricity was out, with hall emergency lights, flashlights and cellphones providing the only illumination.
Fermin Herrera, 20, his wife and their two-month-old daughter left their room on the top floor of the hotel, where they took shelter because they were concerned about trees falling on their Valdosta home.
“We heard some rumbling,” said Herrera, cradling the sleeping baby in a downstairs hallway. “We didn’t see anything at first. After a while the intensity picked up. It looked like a gutter that was banging against our window. So we made a decision to leave.”
Risk of tornadoes
Fast-moving Helene prompted hurricane and flash flood warnings extending far beyond the coast up into northern Georgia and western North Carolina. More than 1.2 million homes and businesses were without power in Florida, more than 190,000 in Georgia and more than 30,000 in the Carolinas, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us. The governors of those states and Alabama and Virginia all declared emergencies.
One person was killed in Florida when a sign fell on their car. In south Georgia, two people were killed when a possible tornado struck a mobile home on Thursday night, Wheeler County Sheriff Randy Rigdon told WMAZ-TV. Wheeler County is about 113 kilometres southeast of Macon.
The risk of tornadoes was expected to continue into the morning across north and central Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and southern North Carolina, forecasters said. Later Friday, there would be the risk of tornadoes in Virginia.
“Helene continues to produce catastrophic winds that are now pushing into southern Georgia,” the hurricane centre said in an update at 1 a.m. Friday. “Persons should not leave their shelters and remain in place through the passage of these life-threatening conditions.”
Even before landfall, the storm’s wrath was felt widely, with sustained tropical storm-force winds and hurricane-force gusts along Florida’s west coast. Water lapped over a road in Siesta Key near Sarasota and covered some intersections in St. Pete Beach.
“When Floridians wake up tomorrow morning, we’re going to be waking up to a state where very likely there’s been additional loss of life and certainly there’s going to be loss of property,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference Thursday night.
The storm made landfall in the sparsely populated Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and vacation hideaways where Florida’s Panhandle and peninsula meet.
Still, Philip Tooke, a commercial fisherman who took over the business his father founded near the region’s Apalachee Bay, planned to ride out this storm like he did during Hurricane Michael and the others: on his boat.
“If I lose that, I don’t have anything,” Tooke said.
Deluge in North Carolina mountains
Many, though, heeded mandatory evacuation orders that stretched from the Panhandle south along the Gulf Coast in low-lying areas around Tallahassee, Gainesville, Cedar Key, Lake City, Tampa and Sarasota in Florida.
Among them were Cindy Waymon and her husband, who went to a shelter in Tallahassee after securing their home and packing medications, snacks and drinks. They wanted to stay safe given the magnitude of the storm, she said.
“This is the first time we’ve actually come to a shelter, because of the complexities of the storm and the uncertainties,” she said.
Federal authorities staged search-and-rescue teams as the weather service forecast storm surges of up to six metres and warned they could be particularly “catastrophic and unsurvivable” in Apalachee Bay.
Airports in Tampa, Tallahassee and Clearwater were closed Thursday, while cancellations were widespread elsewhere in Florida and beyond.
While Helene will likely weaken as it moves inland, damaging winds and heavy rain were expected to extend to the southern Appalachian Mountains, where landslides were possible, forecasters said. Already, up to 25 centimetres of rain fell in the North Carolina mountains, with up to 36 centimetres more possible before the deluge ends, setting the stage for flooding that forecasters warned could be worse than anything seen in the past century.
Helene is the eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which began June 1.