Tropical Storm Debby strengthened rapidly on Sunday and is expected to develop into a hurricane before making landfall on Florida’s Gulf coast, the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, warning of life-threatening ocean surges and devastating flooding.
The hurricane center forecast life-threatening conditions, including storm surges up to 7ft (2 meters). As it slowly moves north through the week, the storm may bring “potentially historic rainfall” of between 10 and 20in (25-50cm) and catastrophic flooding to Georgia and South Carolina, it said.
“There’s some really amazing rainfall totals being forecast, and amazing in a bad way,” Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said to the Associated Press at a briefing on Sunday. “That would be record-breaking rainfall associated with a tropical cyclone for both the states of Georgia and South Carolina if we got up to the 30in level.”
The flooding impacts, which could last through Friday, are expected to be especially severe in low-lying areas near the coast, including Savannah, Georgia; Hilton Head, South Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina.
Preparing for Debby, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, called up 3,000 national guard troops and placed most of Florida’s cities and counties under emergency orders, while evacuations were ordered in parts of the Gulf coast counties of Pasco, Hernando and Citrus.
DeSantis said that, for the first time, constructed flood control devices are being placed at utility stations to try to minimize the risk of power interruptions because of flooding.
“We think that is going to be able to mitigate some of the power outages,” DeSantis said.
Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, made his own emergency proclamation on Saturday.
The White House said federal and Florida officials were in touch and Fema had “pre-positioned” resources including water and food.
Debby became a tropical storm late on Saturday. As of 11am EDT (1500 GMT) Debby was about 130 miles (210km) south-west of Tampa and moving toward the Big Bend region of the Gulf coast at 13mph (20kph), with maximum sustained winds of 65mph (100km/h), the NHC said.
The center of Tropical Storm Debby will move across the eastern Gulf of Mexico through Sunday and reach the Florida Big Bend coast on Monday morning, it added. Debby is then expected to move slowly across northern Florida and southern Georgia on Monday and Tuesday, it said.
The storm left Cuba’s northern coast on Saturday evening, when it was about 100 miles west-south-west of Key West in Florida, the NHC said.
Debby is expected to lose some strength after landfall but bring heavy rain as it crosses central Florida out to the Atlantic coast, before crawling up to Savannah, Georgia, and then onward to Charleston, South Carolina, early in the week.
Ocean surges forecast for Bonita Beach northward to Tampa Bay could send sea waves further inland than normal, damaging structures and endangering anyone in their path.
A tropical storm warning is in effect for extreme southern Florida, stretching as far north as the Fort Myers area crushed by Hurricane Ian in 2022.
“I’d urge all Floridians to be cognizant of the fact that we are going to have a hurricane hit the state, probably a category 1, but it could be a little bit more powerful than that,” DeSantis said in a Sunday morning briefing.
“But we are absolutely going to see a lot of rainfall. We are going to see a lot of saturation. We are going to see flooding events,” he said. “There is also going to be power outages.”
In Tampa alone, officials gave out more than 30,000 sandbags to barricade against flooding.
“We’ve got our stormwater drains cleared out. We’ve got our generators all checked and full. We’re doing everything that we need to be prepared to face a tropical storm,” Tampa’s mayor, Jane Castor, said.
Florida State University in Tallahassee will be closed on Monday due to the storm, the school announced.
Forecasters expect a large number of Atlantic hurricanes in the 2024 season, which began on 1 June, with four to seven seen as major. That exceeds the 2005 record-breaking season that spawned hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Debby is expected to take a similar track to Hurricane Ian, which killed 103 people in Florida and caused damage running into billions of dollars in as it barreled along the Gulf coast.
Only one hurricane, Beryl, has formed in the Atlantic this year. The earliest category 5 storm on record, it struck the Caribbean and Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula before rolling up the Gulf coast of Texas as a category 1 storm, with sustained winds up to 95mph.
