Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (AP) – Hurricane Helene has slammed into Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend region, bringing storm surge and high winds across the state’s Gulf Coast communities before tearing through south Georgia. The storm caused at least 40 deaths, according to an Associated Press count.
Where is the storm now?
Hurricane Helen It weakened to a tropical depression over the Carolinas with maximum sustained winds of 30 mph (48 kph) early Friday morning, the National Hurricane Center said.
The storm will weaken as it moves northwards. As of 2 p.m., Helen was centered about 125 miles (205 kilometers) southeast of Louisville, Kentucky.
Helen wobbled as it neared the coast of Florida late Thursday before developing maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (225 kph). The place was about 20 miles (32 kilometers) to the northwest Cyclone Italia Almost the same ferocity came ashore last year and caused widespread damage.
Evacuations were underway in parts of western North Carolina on Friday. The Haywood County Sheriff’s Office, west of Asheville, said it was helping to evacuate parts of Crusoe, Clyde, Canton and lower Waynesville.
What about airports?
Airports in Florida that were closed due to Hurricane Helen reopened on Friday. That includes Tampa, St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Tallahassee airports.
As of Friday afternoon, 130 flights had been canceled at Tampa International Airport in the past 24 hours, according to FlightAware.
Airports in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, remained open Friday but reported high numbers of cancellations and long delays. By 2 p.m., nearly 400 flights to or from Charlotte, American Airlines’ main hub, had been canceled. According to FlightAware, 580 flights to or from Charlotte were delayed.
At the greater Atlanta airport, 175 flights were canceled and more than 500 were delayed, according to FlightAware.
What about roads and bridges?
Friday morning, investigators were checking bridges and causeways along Florida’s Gulf Coast to quickly open them to traffic, Perdue said.
Additionally, 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of road debris has been cleared across Florida, Perdue said during a news conference in Tallahassee.
“Some of the runways were underwater, so we had to inspect them and make sure they were safe to pass through,” Perdue said. “We had a lot of storm surge up and down the West Coast. We had many roads under water.
How many are powerless?
As of 2:30 p.m. Friday, about 4.2 million people were without power across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee, according to poweroutage.us.
The most outages were in North Carolina and South Carolina — with more than 1 million outages each. More than 840,000 customers were without power in Florida and nearly 950,000 customers were without power in Georgia.
Nearly 45% of homes and businesses in South Carolina were without power Friday. Cyclonic winds caused power outages in all districts. Trees or other debris blocked every major road into Greenwood, a city of about 22,000 people about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Columbia, Greenwood County officials said on social media.
Crews of linemen were stationed across the region to begin the process of restoring power once the winds from Helen subsided.
What about storm surge?
Flooding along Florida’s coast began before Hurricane Helen made landfall, with rapidly rising waters reported as far south as Fort Myers on the state’s Gulf Coast.
Early Friday morning, sheriff’s officials in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, used large ATVs to rescue people trapped in rising waters.
On Cedar Key, an Old Florida-style island off the Gulf Coast, many homes, hotels and businesses were flooded. Even the city’s fire rescue building was spared.
“It actually blew out the storm panels on the front doors. It blew out one of the broken walls in the back and two of the entry doors,” the agency posted online. “It looks like we had about 6 feet or so of water inside.”
What is a storm surge?
Storm surge A level where sea water rises above its normal level.
Just as a storm’s sustained winds do not include the potential for even stronger winds, a storm surge does not include a wave height above mean water level.
A surge is more than a normal tide at a time, so a 15-foot storm surge at high tide can be more devastating than the same surge at low tide.
How are hurricanes measured?
A common way to measure the strength of a hurricane Saffir-Simpson scale Assigns a category from 1 to 5 based on the wind speed at the center of the storm, with 5 being the strongest.
