The most terrifying part of Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida on Wednesday morning, even more than the 129-mph winds and the blinding rain, was the storm surge. When Idalia slammed into the Big Bend area, north of Tampa and south of Tallahassee, it rose as high as 12 feet, about the level of the second floor in most houses.
“I was swimming inside my house,” one Big Bend survivor told NBC News.
The good news is that the bulk of the storm passed north of the heavily populated Tampa area, although there was a lot of local flooding. Indeed, 9.4 inches of rain fell in Clearwater Beach. But the newly erected Aqua Fence built around Tampa General Hospital, the only major trauma center in the area, was barely needed.
But farther north, the storm was the worst since 1890, and for many Big Bend residents it was a life-changing event. “It came through – the entire ocean,” Donna Knight, a clammer in Cedar Key, a group of small islands jutting three miles into the Gulf of Mexico, told The New York Times. All the buildings in the Cedar Key downtown area were heavily damaged.
In nearby Keaton Beach, where the storm first hit, the winds were between 111- and 129-mph, and the surge sent water rushing through houses; the first floor of one house there was five feet underwater. In Horseshoe Beach and Perry, the water tore houses from their foundations. In Steinhatchee, the marina was flooded out, and some houses caught fire from downed electrical wires.
Idalia lost some strength as it moved across the top of Florida into Georgia and then the Carolinas, dumping rain, flooding roads and some low-lying homes. The winds were still strong enough to overturn cars before Idalia, now a tropical storm, headed into the Atlantic and toward Bermuda.
Read more at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/30/hurricane-idalia-florida-landfall and see the videos below:
