FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) – Hurricane Helen slams into Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend region, bringing storm surge and strong winds to the state’s Gulf Coast region and later damaging southern Georgia. . The storm is believed to have killed at least 40 people, according to an Associated Press tally.
Where is the storm now?
hurricane helen By early Friday afternoon, it had weakened to a tropical depression over the Carolinas, with maximum sustained wind speeds of 30 mph (48 kph), the National Hurricane Center said.
The storm will weaken as it continues northward. At 2 p.m., Helen was centered about 125 miles (205 km) southeast of Louisville, Kentucky.
Helen staggered as it approached the Florida coast late Thursday, coming ashore near the mouth of the Aucilla River, where speeds are estimated to be up to 140 mph (225 kph). The site was only about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of the site. hurricane idalia Last year, it made landfall with almost the same ferocity and caused widespread damage.
Evacuations began Friday in areas of western North Carolina. The Haywood County Sheriff’s Office, west of Asheville, said it was assisting with evacuations in the lower areas of Crusoe, Clyde, Canton and Waynesville.
What about the airport?
Florida airports reopened Friday after being closed due to Hurricane Helen. This included airports in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Lakeland, and Tallahassee.
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 many cancellations and significant delays were reported. By 2 p.m., about 400 flights to and from Charlotte, American Airlines’ main hub, had been canceled. Nearly 580 additional flights to and from Charlotte were delayed, according to FlightAware.
At the larger Atlanta airport, 175 flights were canceled and more than 500 were delayed, according to FlightAware.
What about roads and bridges?
Perdue said inspectors were out Friday morning inspecting bridges and causeways along Florida’s Gulf Coast to quickly reopen them to traffic.
Additionally, Perdue said at a news conference in Tallahassee that debris has been cleared from 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of roads across Florida.
“Parts of the embankment were under water, so we’ll have to inspect it to make sure it’s safe to pass,” Perdue said. “We had a lot of storm surge up and down the West Coast. A lot of roads were under water.”
How many people are without power?
As of 2:30 p.m. Friday, about 4.2 million people in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee were without power, according to poweroutage.us.
Most of the outages occurred in North Carolina and South Carolina, each with more than 1 million outages. More than 840,000 customers in Florida lost power, and nearly 950,000 customers in Georgia lost power.
On Friday, nearly 45% of South Carolina homes and businesses were without power. The entire county lost power due to hurricane-force winds. Greenwood County officials announced on social media that all major roads leading into Greenwood, a city of about 22,000 people about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Columbia, were closed due to trees and debris. .
Crews of power transmission workers were stationed throughout the region, ready to begin the process of restoring power as soon as the winds from Helen subsided.
What about storm surge?
Flooding along Florida’s coast began well before Hurricane Helen made landfall, with water levels reportedly rising rapidly from 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, were using large ATVs to rescue people stranded in rising waters.
Many homes, motels and businesses were flooded in Cedar Key, an old Florida-style island off the coast of the Gulf. Not even the city’s fire and rescue building was saved.
“In fact, the storm panel on the front door was blown off. One of the rear destruction walls and two entry/exit doors were blown off,” authorities posted online. “It appears there was about six feet or more of water inside.”
What is storm surge?
high tide This is the level at which seawater rises above its normal level.
Just as a storm’s sustained winds do not include the possibility of stronger wind gusts, a storm surge does not include wave heights above average water level.
And because storm surge is an amount that exceeds normal tides all at once, a 15-foot storm surge at high tide can be much more destructive than the same storm surge at low tide.
How are hurricanes measured?
The most common way to measure hurricane strength is saffir simpson scale It assigns a category from 1 to 5 based on the sustained wind speed at the center of the storm. 5 would be the strongest.
