TAMPA (AP) – Hurricane Debby made landfall yesterday in northern Florida as a Category 1 storm.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Debby has maximum sustained winds 129 kilometres per hour. The storm made landfall in Steinhatchee, a tiny community of less than 1,000 residents in the Big Bend area of Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Forecasters warned heavy rain could spawn catastrophic flooding in Florida, South Carolina and Georgia.
Debby is the fourth named storm of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.
“Right now, we are to trying secure everything from floating away,” said Sheryl Horne, whose family owns the Shell Island Fish Camp along the Wakulla River in St Marks, Florida, where some customers moved their boats inland.
The sparsely populated Big Bend region in the Florida Panhandle also was hit last year by Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane.
“I am used to storms and I’m used to cleaning up after storms,” Horne said.
The National Weather Service in Tallahassee said yesterday morning that heavy flooding was the biggest concern in the Big Bend regions, with storm surge expected across Apalachee Bay.
In Marion County, which is inland and south of Gainesville, sheriff’s officials noted in a Facebook post yesterday that crews were responding to reports of downed power lines and trees that have fallen on roadways and homes.
Debby was expected to move eastward over northern Florida and then stall over the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, thrashing the region with potential record-setting rains totaling up to 76 centimetres beginning today.
Officials also warned of life-threatening storm surge along Florida’s Gulf Coast, with 1.8 to three metres of inundation between the Ochlockonee and Suwannee rivers.
“There’s some really amazing rainfall totals being forecast and amazing in a bad way,” director of the hurricane centre Michael Brennan said at a briefing. “That would be record-breaking rainfall associated with a tropical cyclone for both the states of Georgia and South Carolina if we got up to the 30-inch level.”
Flooding could last through Friday and is expected to be especially severe in low-lying areas near the coast, including Savannah, Georgia; Hilton Head, South Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina. North Carolina officials were monitoring the storm’s progress.
Officials in Savannah said the area could see a month’s worth of rain in four days if the system stalls over the region.
