FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (news agencies) — Massive Hurricane Helene crashed into Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend region, bringing storm surge and high winds across the state’s Gulf Coast communities before ripping into southern Georgia. The storm has been blamed for at least 40 deaths, according to an media tally.
Hurricane Helene weakened to a tropical depression over the Carolinas with maximum sustained winds of 30 mph (48 kph) by early afternoon Friday, the National Hurricane Center said.
The storm will continue to weaken as it continues to move north. At 2 p.m., Helene was centered about 125 miles (205 kilometers) southeast of Louisville, Kentucky.
Helene wobbled as it approached Florida’s coast late Thursday before making landfall near the mouth of the Aucilla River with maximum sustained winds estimated at 140 mph (225 kph). That location was only about 20 miles (32 kilometers) northwest of where Hurricane Idalia came ashore last year at nearly the same ferocity and caused widespread damage.
Evacuations were underway Friday in areas of Western North Carolina. The Haywood County Sheriff’s Office west of Asheville said it was helping with evacuations in in Cruso, Clyde, Canton and lower-lying parts of Waynesville.
Airports in Florida that closed due to Hurricane Helene were reopened Friday. That included airports in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Lakeland and Tallahassee.
At Tampa International Airport there had been 130 flight cancellations in the past 24 hours, as of Friday afternoon, according to FlightAware.
Airports in Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, remained open Friday but were reporting large numbers of cancellations and heavy delays. By 2 p.m., nearly 400 flights to or from Charlotte, a major hub for American Airlines, had been canceled. Nearly 580 more, to or 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.
On Friday morning, inspectors were out examining bridges and causeways along Florida’s Gulf Coast to get them back open to traffic quickly, Perdue said.
In addition, 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) of roadway across Florida have been cleared of debris, Perdue said during a news conference in Tallahassee.
“Some of the causeways were underwater, so we have to inspect them and make sure they are safe to pass,” Perdue said. “We had a lot of storm surge up and down the west coast. We had a lot of roads underwater.”
As of 2:30 p.m. Friday, some 4.2 million people across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee were without power, according to poweroutage.us.
Most of the outages were in North Carolina and South Carolina — each with more than 1 million outages. Florida had more than 840,000 customers and Georgia nearly 950,000 customers without power.
Almost 45% of homes and businesses in South Carolina were without power Friday. Whole counties were without electricity as winds gusted to near hurricane force. Trees or other debris blocked every major road leading into Greenwood, a city of about 22,000 people about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Columbia, Greenwood County officials said on social media.
Crews of linemen were stationed across the region, ready to begin the process of restoring power as soon as the winds from Helene died down.
Flooding along Florida’s coast began well before Hurricane Helene made landfall, with rapidly rising waters reported from as far south as Fort Myers on the state’s Gulf Coast.
Early Friday, sheriff’s officials in Hillsborough County, where Tampa is located, were using a large ATV to rescue people who were stranded by rising waters.
In Cedar Key, an old Florida-style island off the Gulf Coast, many homes, motels and businesses were flooded. Not even the city’s fire rescue building was spared.
“It actually blew out the storm panels on the front doors. Blew out one of the breakaway walls on the back and two entry doors,” the agency posted online. “It appears that we had about 6 feet or better of water inside.”
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