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Hurricane Debby made landfall along Florida’s Big Bend coast on Monday morning after it was strengthened to a Category 1 storm, leaving Floridians bracing for catastrophic conditions as the storm heads north.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) announced that the storm came ashore near the coastal town of Steinhatchee in Taylor County, Florida, at approximately 7am ET on Monday with maximum sustained winds of 80mph.
Debby now continues to push slowly north-northeast through the Sunshine State at 10mph bringing with it as much as 20 inches of rain. It is then expected to drift towards coastal Georgia and South Carolina throughout the week.
The director of NHC Jamie Rhome told the BBC that the storm will likely cause “catastrophic flooding”. While storm surge reached up to six-feet at Cedar Key in the early hours of Monday morning.
The National Weather Service (NWS) also gave a tornado watch update, which predicts almost 11.7 million Florida and Georgia residents could be exposed to tornadoes – ranging from Sarasota, Florida, to Savannah, Georgia. Additionally, 2,287 schools and 158 hospitals are in the potential path of tornadoes.
Almost a quarter of a million homes and businesses were left without power by approximately 10.30am ET across Florida, according to PowerOutage.us – with the counties of Taylor, Madison and Jefferson hit the hardest.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said some 17,000 linemen are working to restore electricity.
Debby grew in strength overnight in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, building from a tropical storm to a hurricane.
DeSantis declared a state of emergency on Sunday and warned residents to “make sure you’re executing your plan now”.
He has also warned citizens not to “tempt fate” by driving in torrential conditions over the risk of “traffic fatalities,” he said in a Monday morning briefing.
Over the weekend, Florida residents had begun to hunker down for the storm, boarding up their windows and evacuating homes in storm surge evacuation zones.
The hurricane is forecasted to move across northern Florida and into southern Georgia, where the NWS says it will “weaken to a tropical storm”, before dipping into the Atlantic Ocean.
This means dangerous winds are also forecast to drift inland towards Georgia, South Carolina, and parts of North Carolina from Monday through Wednesday before the storm dissipates at the South-North Carolina border at around 8pm Friday.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster also issued emergency declarations for their states.
Once over the Atlantic, Debby is not expected to regain hurricane strength, meaning South Carolina, Georgia, and parts of Florida’s northeastern coasts are under tropical storm rather than hurricane warnings.
However, NHC director Dr Michael Brennan said the storm slowing down over land could “exacerbate not just the rainfall risk but also the potential for storm surge and some strong winds”.
