After leaving four dead in its path through Florida, in the southeastern United States, tropical storm Debby is entering Georgia on Monday and threatens to cause “catastrophic floods”.
Two of the victims, a 38-year-old female driver and a 12-year-old boy who were traveling together in a car, died in a crash in Dixie County in northwest Florida on Sunday night.
The woman lost control of the vehicle due to bad weather conditions and crashed into a guardrail, local authorities said.
In another traffic accident, a 64-year-old man crashed his semi-trailer into a wall and, after the cab became detached, fell into a canal near Tampa, where emergency services found his body.
The fourth victim was a 13-year-old boy who was in his family’s mobile home when a tree downed by the storm crushed him.
Debby made landfall in Florida as a Category 1 hurricane on a scale of 5 before weakening into a powerful tropical storm.
In the next few hours it will bring “extreme rainfall”, which could cause “Catastrophic flooding in coastal areas of Georgia, South Carolina and even North Carolina“warned Michael Brennan, director of the US hurricane center (NHC).
The storm is expected to move across southern Georgia on Monday night and Tuesday before reaching the South Carolina coast.
After peaking at 120 km/h, its maximum sustained winds dropped to 75 km/h and will continue to slow, according to the latest NHC bulletin.
“The impacts of Debby They are just beginning, they will spread throughout the week across portions of the southeastern coast of the United States.“Brennan said.
As the storm moves away from the coast, it will move more slowly, which will cause “an episode of extreme rainfall of long duration” in the areas it passes through, he added.
State of emergency
Debby It hit the so-called Big Bend, a sparsely populated region that connects the Florida peninsula to the rest of the United States in the northwest, and which already suffered the onslaught of Hurricane Idalia, a Category 3 hurricane, last year.
“This did not bring the catastrophic hurricane-force winds we have seen in previous storms (in Florida) such as Hurricane Ian (in 2022), but it has dumped and continues to dump a lot of water.“, Governor Ron DeSantis said at a press conference, urging residents to be cautious.
According to him, some 250,000 people were left without electricity on Monday in Florida.
In the western city of Sarasota, some 500 residents had to be evacuated from their flooded homes to higher ground, local police said on social media.
US President Joe Biden on Monday approved an emergency declaration for South Carolina, as he did for Florida on Sunday, a move that will speed up the delivery of federal aid.
“Personnel from the Department of Defense, the Department of Health, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Coast Guard have been deployed and are prepared to support“the White House press office said in a statement.
The Border Patrol announced on social media X an unexpected benefit of the hurricane: its winds pushed 25 packages of cocaine to the coast of the Florida Keys, in the southwest of the state, where they were seized. The shipment has a street value of more than a million dollars, said an official of that agency.
In July, Hurricane Beryl, unusually early, hit the southern United States, leaving several dead.
According to forecasts from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this year’s Atlantic hurricane season – which runs from June to November – is shaping up to be particularly hectic due to high ocean temperatures that increase the intensity of these storms.
Source: Gestion
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