Hurricane Idalia: Florida focuses on saving people after the phenomenon flooded large areas

Florida this Thursday focused on rescue and recovery tasks in the areas hardest hit by Idaliawho came in on Wednesday as Category 3 hurricane over northwestern this statethen continued through the southeastern U.S. and is now hovering over the Atlantic Ocean as a tropical storm.

Idalia made landfall early Wednesday with sustained winds of 125 mph on Keaton Beach, in Florida’s “Big Bend,” a mostly rural area that was battling a “considerable damage”as stated today at a press conference by the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis.

Accompanied by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator Deanne Criswell, the governor pointed out that there are currently there are no deaths from Idaliathough the Florida Highway Patrol said Thursday the cyclone was the indirect cause of the deaths of two people driving in “extreme” weather conditions.

DeSantis added that as of last night, state emergency services are on the scene they had managed to save about 40 people trapped in flooded homes or areas, while Criswell said the immediate priority is to make sure no one is left stranded in affected communities.

The FEMA executive, who will tour the hardest hit areas with DeSantis today, said she would turn over the governor’s request to US President Joe Biden to issue a declaration of “major disaster” to this state .

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Initial assessments suggest that damage caused by Idalia is less than that caused nearly a year ago by the powerful Hurricane Ian, which also slammed into Florida’s west coast and was responsible for nearly 150 deaths and millions of losses.

“Ian was different, you saw boats flying a few metres. While there is certainly destruction in this case, what you see now is mostly rubble and wood because it’s a rural area,” DeSantis explains.

Power recovery and dirt removal

The attention of state and federal authorities this Thursday is in the “Big Bend”, the area with the greatest impact and where the more than 140,000 homes and buildings that are still without power, according to the specialized website PowerOutage.us.

DeSantis said power has already been restored to some 420,000 customers who lost power due to Idalia and some 40,000 employees are on site to continue repairing or replacing affected power pylons.

Although the populated Tampa Bay avoided the worst of the cyclone, images of the devastating flooding caused by the storm surge brought by Idalia are still emerging today, which marked a historic record in Cedar Key, north of the city of Tampa : the sea, according to preliminary data, rose to almost 2.4 meters above normal level.

Television stations and local media in this small town on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico are talking about it historic floods and shows images of inner city streets turned into rivers, as well as buildings and homes that are under water.

A little further south, in hard-hit Pasco County, up to 6,000 homes were damaged by the cyclone, according to the CNN network, which is also responsible for the rescue of some 150 people in several neighborhoods.

Idalia lost power after passing Georgia and South Carolina, the latter was declared a disaster area by President Biden today and is a tropical storm with winds of 95 km/h that is located over the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of North Carolina.

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Tropical storm warnings and storm surge warnings of up to 1.2 meters are still in effect for parts of the North Carolina coast, where more than 12,500 homes and buildings are without power and where Governor Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency this week. .

According to the US National Hurricane Center (NHC), Idalia will continue to move away from the coast of North Carolina throughout the day, even becoming a post-tropical cyclone, before regaining tropical storm status over the weekend, when it nears Bermuda. comes.

It is precisely this British territory that suffered on Wednesday from the effects of the strong Hurricane Franklin, a long-lasting cyclone that causes waves and undertow in much of the US Atlantic coast. (JO)

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