Florida Division of Emergency Management executive director Kevin Guthrie spoke to reporters at Tampa Electric Co.’s headquarters in Tampa on Sept. 25, 2024. (Photo by Mitch Perry/Florida Phoenix)
Hurricane Helene will bring life-threatening storm surge, damaging winds, and flooding rains to a large portion of Florida, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Wednesday morning.
Helene turned from a tropical storm to a hurricane while making its way up the western Caribbean by the time the NHC updated its forecast at 11 a.m.
“We are going to have a significant impact from this storm,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at the headquarters of Tampa Electric Co. in eastern Hillsborough County. “The models vary on how intense, but there’s clearly a path to rapidly intensify prior to making landfall.”
Forecasters expect Helene to reach Category 3 status with winds as high as 125 mph before landfall.
DeSantis said the track of the storm indicates landfall someplace in the Big Bend area of North Florida on Thursday night.
“Right now, it’s in that Wakulla/Franklin County area and would potentially proceed into the city of Tallahassee,” he said. “Now, these things can wobble one way or another, but it is somewhat remarkable, when I looked at this morning’s runs, most of those models are pretty much in agreement about the path of this storm.”
Another storm
The Big Bend area has been the site of the two most powerful storms to hit Florida in the past year — Hurricane Idalia in August 2023 and Hurricane Debby just last month.
Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said that as of 9:30 a.m. Wednesday 64 of the state’s 67 counties were under some type of tropical storm, flood, storm surge, or hurricane watch or warning — with only Escambia, Okaloosa, and Santa Rosa not included.
Multiple counties in Florida are calling on residents who live in evacuation zones to leave their homes for higher ground. Florida residents can learn if they need to evacuate by going to the state’s Division of Emergency Management website and listing their address.
Guthrie said there is also the possibility of life-threatening rising water moving inland from the coastline in the next 36 hours along the entire Gulf Coast.
DeSantis and Guthrie said they were waiting for FEMA to approve the state’s updated request for an emergency declaration and federal assistance for 21 more counties. On Tuesday, FEMA approved the original request for 41 counties made by the DeSantis administration the day before, but the state has now expanded the areas needing that approval.
Need for assistance
Guthrie explained the relevance of getting that pre-approval for emergency assistance from FEMA.
“I was talking with someone this morning from a fiscally constrained rural county on our Gulf Coast who’s having to make decisions today because they’ve been hit by two storms, and they’re saying, ‘Look. We can’t afford to put the police officer out there directing traffic because we’re not guaranteed that we’re going to get reimbursed for that security mission, or that traffic mission,” he said. “Counties are making decisions based on what’s in that declaration.”
The storm is expected to knock out electricity for hundreds of thousands of residents. DeSantis said that 18,000 utility linemen from out of state were already in Florida as of Wednesday morning, with more coming later in the day. But he expressed optimism that power could be restored relatively quickly.
“Some of our most recent storms, you’ve had significant outages in terms of the number of customers, but the length in which they were out has been historically low in terms of other storms in other states,” he said.