Hurricane Helene Swells to Category 4 as It Nears Florida
(Bloomberg) -- Helene grew to a Category 4 hurricane as it rapidly gained speed on its way toward Florida’s west coast, where the massive storm threatens to push a wall of water onshore and rake a large swath of the southeastern US with tree-snapping power.
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The storm’s top winds are holding steady at 130 miles (209 kilometers) per hour but could increase in the coming hours, the US National Hurricane Center said at 8 p.m. local time. Helene is expected to make landfall late Thursday near St. Marks, Florida, about 20 miles south of the state capital Tallahassee, according to commercial forecaster AccuWeather.
Hurricane-force winds are a rare occurrence in Tallahassee, but Mayor John Dailey warned residents in a post on X that Helene had the potential to cause devastation.
“The impacts are expected to be significant,” Dailey said. “Widespread and prolonged power outages, damage to critical infrastructure, catastrophic damage to the trees and power lines, widespread inaccessibility due to blocked roads and damage to well-built structures will all be likely.”
Storm surge warnings are now in effect along almost all of Florida’s west coast, including the Tampa Bay area, which could see up to 8 feet of water.
Helene’s tropical-storm-force winds now extend 310 miles, which means as the hurricane’s eye crosses Florida’s shores, its outer winds will have pushed beyond Atlanta. Nearly 500,000 customers are without power across the southeast US, according to PowerOutage.us, with the majority in Florida.
Based on the radius of tropical-storm-strength winds, Helene will be the largest Gulf of Mexico hurricane to make landfall since Irma in 2017 and probably one of the three largest since 1988, said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher with Colorado State University.
In addition to the damage Helene inflicts on the Florida coast, forecasters are expecting severe rains and flash flooding deep into the Appalachian Mountains and the Ohio Valley, along with a risk of landslides. President Joe Biden has approved emergency disaster declaration requests from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, according to the White House.
“Because of its size and fast forward speed, Helene will be resilient to falling apart,” said Peter Mullinax, a meteorologist at the US Weather Prediction Center. “This is why tropical storm warnings extend so far north, even into parts of the Carolinas. It’s just going to take longer for the storm to dramatically weaken.”
Across the Appalachians, record or historic flooding is expected as Helene moves north, the National Weather Service in Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina, said in a statement. “This will be one of the most significant weather events to happen in the western portions of the area in the modern era,” it said.
Helene is expected to bring intense thunderstorms, which will likely generate “spin-up tornadoes” far inland, said Jennifer Collins, a geosciences professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Those tornadoes, which tend to arrive with little warning, occur when downdrafts of rain-cooled air create fierce winds at a storm’s leading edge.
“They’re often a very small size and don’t come from the classic severe supercell storm you could easily see on radar,” Collins said.
Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler with Enki Research, wrote in a blog post Thursday that total damage and losses could exceed $20 billion.
Helene’s path is imperiling Tampa-based fertilizer producer Mosaic Co., RBC Capital Markets analyst Andrew Wong said in a note Thursday. A possible five-day outage of Mosaic’s phosphate operations in Florida could dent the company’s profit by up to $25 million by some measures.
The storm’s remnants also have the potential to damage 10% of US cotton production, mainly in eastern Alabama and Georgia, according to Commodity Weather Group. Cotton futures have risen this month on weather risks and on Tuesday reached the highest price since late June.
Mandatory and voluntary evacuations are underway in 23 counties, according to the Florida Division of Emergency Management. In addition, Florida declared an emergency in all but six of 67 counties. Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia have also all declared emergencies.
--With assistance from Ilena Peng, Mary Hui and Kim Chipman.
(Updates throughout.)
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