Residents hunker down as Hurricane Idalia hits Florida

Steinhatchee — Millions of residents were evacuated or hunkered down in homes and bunkers as Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region as an “extremely dangerous” category 3 storm on Wednesday, and authorities warned a life-threatening storm surge is possible.

Drawing strength from the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters, Idalia was forecast to unleash destructive winds and torrential downpours that will cause coastal flooding up to 4.9m deep.

“Don’t put your life at risk by doing anything dumb at this point. This thing’s powerful,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said at an early news briefing in Tallahassee that was interrupted for a few seconds by a power cut.

The National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said Idalia made landfall early morning (11.45pm GMT) at Keaton Beach, an oceanfront community of 13,000 people in Taylor County, about 121km southeast of Tallahassee, the state capital. It is located in Florida’s Big Bend region, where the state’s northern Gulf Coast panhandle curves into the western side of the Florida Peninsula.

Video footage from Keaton Beach posted on social media platform X by storm chaser Sidney Grimmett showed heavy downpours and trees whipping in the wind as an electrical line sparked along the side of a roadway.

Overnight, Idalia attained “an extremely dangerous category 4 intensity” on the five-step Saffir-Simpson wind scale on its way to landfall in Florida Wednesday morning, the NHC in Miami said.

But by morning it weakened slightly, slipping into category 3, with maximum sustained winds of 201km. Any storm reaching category 3 or higher is considered a major hurricane.

Most of Florida’s 21-million residents, and many in the adjacent states of Georgia and South Carolina, were under hurricane warnings and other storm-related advisories. State emergency declarations were issued in all three.

Rain warning

“They are expecting some fatalities, so I don’t want to be one of them,” Rene Hoffman said as she prepared to leave her home in Steinhatchee, Florida. She owns a food stand that she secured to her husband’s bakkie to keep it from washing or blowing away.

Florida’s Gulf Coast, southeastern Georgia and eastern parts of North and South Carolina could face 10cm-20cm of rain on Thursday, with isolated areas seeing as much as 30cm of rain, the hurricane centre warned.

Officials said the storm’s most dangerous feature would be a powerful surge of wind-driven surf that is expected to flood barrier islands and other low-lying areas along the coast.

Surge warnings were posted for hundreds of kilometres of shoreline, from Sarasota to the sport fishing haven of Indian Pass at the western end of Apalachicola Bay. In some areas, the surge could rise as high as 4.9m, the NHC said.

“If you end up with a storm surge that even approaches [4.9m], the chances of surviving that are not great,” DeSantis said. “You would need to be in a three-story building because it is going to rise very, very high.”

Sparsely populated compared with the Tampa-St Petersburg area to the south, the Big Bend features a marshy coast, threaded with freshwater springs and rivers, and a cluster of small offshore islands forming Cedar Key, a fishing village demolished in 1896 by a hurricane’s storm surge.

At the White House on Tuesday, US President Biden said he and DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Biden in the 2024 presidential election, were “in constant contact” about storm preparations.

Mass evacuations

Biden was set to speak about the government’s hurricane response efforts later on Wednesday.

Idalia grew from a tropical storm into a hurricane early on Tuesday, a day after passing west of Cuba, where it damaged homes, knocked out power, flooded villages and prompted mass evacuations.

It will be the fourth major hurricane to strike Florida in the past seven years, after Irma in 2017, Michael in 2018 and Ian, which peaked at category 5, last September.

More than 40 school districts in Florida cancelled classes, DeSantis said, and Tampa International Airport suspended commercial operations on Tuesday.

About 5,500 National Guard members were mobilised, while 30,000-40,000 electricity workers were on standby. The state has set aside 5-million litres of petrol to address interruptions to fuel supplies, the governor said.

In Sarasota — a city hard-hit by Ian last year — Milton Bontrager, who runs a charter fishing service near Tampa, said his home is boarded up and stocked with food, water and a generator, and his boats are secure.

“I don’t panic, I prepare,” he said.

Reuters