August 30, 2023 - Idalia makes Florida landfall

About 150 residents were rescued from flooded neighborhoods in Pasco County as Hurricane Idalia moved through Florida, according to an official.  

The calls to emergency services began at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, according to Pasco County Fire Rescue Chief Tony Perez.

“85 rescue missions were dispatched, but we were able to help evacuate a total of 150 residents from that area," he told CNN.

Perez said fire rescue worked hard to ensure that everyone was accounted for. 

Some people did not heed evacuation orders because they didn’t want to leave their homes and belongings. Others did not have the money to leave and wanted to ride out the storm, he said.

Major flooding inundated homes with 3- 5-foot surges, leaving people unable to evacuate themselves. 

Local law enforcement and the electric company are surveying the neighborhoods, going house to house, and making visual inspections to ensure that it is safe to turn the power back on in the area, according to Perez.

Still, Perez said it could have been much worse. If a Category 4 storm had swept through the area "it would have been decimated, and we would probably be talking about body recovery, and we would still be in there working,” he said.

The WC-130J Hercules aircraft from the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron departed Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, Tuesday at 11 p.m. ET.

The one time my soul left my body, I was on the flight deck with the pilots. It was dark for the majority of our flight. The lightning was so intense, and the hail hitting the plane was so intense.

“We’re about to go through the eye wall,” a crew member said.

I’m sitting up there with the pilots. We’re rocking and swaying, and all of a sudden, the flight controls start screaming, “Check Altitude. Check Altitude. Check Altitude. Throttle up. Throttle up.” And I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this is what happens in the movies.’

And those pilots were just cool, calm and collected, and steered us through it. It was amazing. We had one moment where we dropped really rapidly because we hit a pocket and everybody on the plane literally levitated. We were kind of airborne.

We went from Category 2 to Category 4 in a short amount of time. We were in the eye of the storm for a good eight hours. Just zigzagging in and out, penetrating different parts of the eye wall and then going back into the eye. We knew we were in the eye and that’s when everybody kind of got up. They would get a drink of water.

In the eye itself, it was super calm. There was no turbulence. As soon as we started to rock a little bit everybody ran back to their jump seats and sat down. As we’re crisscrossing in and out, you can feel every time we reentered the eye wall. You could feel the intensity of the turbulence a little bit more, then a little bit more, and a little bit more. Every time.

Everybody’s job is so vital to the mission and so crucial to the safety of that flight that they can’t stop when there’s turbulence. They have to keep doing what they need to do. It was serious. It was all business. Hours later, the aircraft approached Keesler over the glistening water and landed safely.

It felt good to be back on solid ground.

Read more about the flight:

Hurricane Idalia has left its mark on history, proving to be a once-in-a-lifetime storm for parts of Florida.

Idalia was the first major hurricane – Category 3 or stronger – on record to track through Florida’s Apalachee Bay, a northern inlet in the Big Bend.

Here are some of the preliminary reports of rain and wind conditions from the National Weather Service:

Rain:

Wind:

A 15-mile stretch of Interstate 10 in Madison County remains closed following Hurricane Idalia, although the department of transportation is working to have it re-opened tonight, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday.

As the state cleans up after the storm, the governor said that all bridges have been cleared to reopen, including the Cedar Key Bridge, which connects the island to the Florida mainland in the hard-hit Big Bend area.

There is only one “unconfirmed fatality” in Florida so far in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia as officials continue to search hard-hit areas, the governor said Wednesday.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is currently looking into a death that involved a “traffic incident," Gov. Ron DeSantis said.

There have not yet been any confirmed deaths due to the storm, he said.

Earlier, Florida Highway Patrol Sgt. Steve Gaskins said two men were killed in two separate accidents Wednesday morning during severe storm conditions from Idalia. Gaskins said both deaths were weather-related. It’s unclear if DeSantis is talking about one of these crashes.

Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said most people did leave before the storm made landfall.

DeSantis said the death toll and aftermath of Hurricane Idalia is not as severe as when Hurricane Ian hit the state in September 2022.

"Panicked phone calls of people calling whose homes were filling up with water was something that was very, very ominous,” he said, referring to the impact of Ian.

Many of these calls were coming toward the beginning of the storm, ultimately, leading to a lot of deaths, the governor said. At least 125 people died.

“I remember the feeling of dread that you had when you start to hear those initial reports. That has not been how this storm has been. They were not getting the same type of phone calls,” DeSantis said.

Guthrie said 75% of the initial search of the impacted areas has been completed. He said as of Wednesday evening, crews are still working.

On Thursday, officials will move on to securing and stabilizing hard-hit areas from getting any worse, he said. Crews will also go back through heavily impacted areas for a secondary search to make sure no one is left there.

Officials will start conducting damage assessments in communities of both individual property and public buildings, Guthrie said.

Before making landfall as a Category 3 storm, Hurricane Idalia went through a remarkable period of rapid intensification Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. Its maximum winds increased by 55 mph over the course of just 24 hours.

With a vast pool of warm ocean water to draw from, the storm converted that heat into wind power. Strong winds are one of the more dangerous aspects of hurricanes, in addition to storm surge and heavy rainfall.

In a post on Wednesday, meteorologist and hurricane expert Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections drew the line between the extra warmth, higher wind speeds and how much damage the storm could inflict. Recent research has suggested that for every 1 degree Celsius that ocean temperatures rise, hurricane wind speeds could increase by as much as 4 to 5% — which in turn can amplify the storm’s destructive potential by 40 to 50%, Masters pointed out.

In 1987, Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, theorized that hurricane wind speed can be expected to increase by about 5% for every 1 degree Celsius that tropical ocean temperatures rise.

Tom Knutson, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told CNN that 4 to 5% is “toward the higher end of the range across studies.” Some studies, like one that Knutson authored, showed a 3.75% increase.

But that increase — however small — can dramatically increase a hurricane’s damage potential, Masters explained.

“A 4-5% increase in hurricane winds may not seem like a big deal, but damage from a hurricane increases exponentially with an increase in winds,” Masters wrote. “For example, according to NOAA, a Category 2 hurricane with 100 mph winds will do 10 times the damage of a Category 1 hurricane with 75 mph winds. This includes damage not only from winds, but also from storm surge, inland flooding, and tornadoes.”

More than 460,000 customers are without power in Florida and Georgia on Wednesday evening, according to tracker PowerOutage.Us.

About 99% of customers in Jefferson, Madison and Suwannee in Florida are without power as of 5 p.m.

Tropical Storm Idalia is now heading along the coast of South Carolina. It made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday morning.

About 4,000 to 6,000 homes were damaged in Pasco County during Hurricane Idalia, according to Pasco County Administrator Mike Carballa. 

Much of the damage occurred along the coast, and homes were inundated with water, Carballa told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Pasco County, north of Tampa, is in Florida's Big Bend region, which was where Idalia made landfall as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday morning.

Carballa said he watched first responders switch to water rescue operations Wednesday morning because residents did not heed evacuation orders. 

Pasco County had space for 12,000 people in its shelters, according to Carballa, but the county took in around “a couple a hundred.”

Carballa said he received one report of a traffic fatality early Wednesday morning but did not have the details. 

He said that fire rescue teams were able to get everyone out that wanted to leave. 

According to Carballa, this storm was the worst in recent memory. 

Idalia continues to weaken as it moves over southeastern Georgia and is now a 70 mph tropical storm, according to the 5 p.m. ET advisory from the National Hurricane Center.

The storm will continue to bring the risk of freshwater flooding, storm surge and strong winds to portions of Georgia and the Carolinas into Thursday.