Hurricane Live Updates: Threat of Flooding Swells as Helene’s Rainfall Exceeds Expectations
Florida was bracing for a “nasty” day, Gov. Ron DeSantis said, after forecasters said the storm would likely continue growing stronger and larger before coming ashore on the Gulf Coast.
The whirring of power drills and the thwack-thwacking of nails into plywood boards provided the soundtrack to a restless day across Florida, as pounding rain began to flood cities in Hurricane Helene’s wide path. By midday, the rainfall ahead of the storm was outperforming expectations, forecasters said, escalating the potential for flooding throughout the Southeast.
Helene had become a Category 2 hurricane with 105 mile-per-hour winds by lunchtime, and was forecast to continue strengthening before landfall later Thursday. In Florida, even the most hardened residents eyed the churning Gulf with distress, readying their homes and minds for a storm so large that officials said it may leave no part of the state untouched.
Here’s what we’re covering:
Anxiety in the capital: Forecasters issued warnings that Helene could intensify to a Category 4, with winds of at least 130 m.p.h., before coming ashore late Thursday on the Florida Panhandle south of Tallahassee, the state capital, which has never faced hurricane-force winds. The ominous forecast prompted officials there to question whether the state’s emergency operations headquarters could withstand a hurricane.
Another Big Bend blow: As of Thursday morning, 19 counties around Florida’s Big Bend region, a sparsely populated stretch of marshy coastline hit hard by two powerful stormsin the last 13 months, had issued mandatory evacuation orders for at least some residents. Officials warned those reluctant to leave that they faced extreme danger.
Size and strength: Record-setting ocean temperatures are acting like “high-octane jet fuel” for the intensifying storm, one researcher said, with forecasters saying Helene could spread heavy rain and strong winds as far as Atlanta and southern Appalachia. By Thursday morning, states of emergency had been declared as far north as Virginia, and excessive rain warnings stretched from Atlanta all the way to Asheville, N.C.
Ken Graham, the director of the National Weather Service, is taking his first flight aboard a hurricane hunter airplane and has spent the morning passing through the eye of Helene. He sent me a message from the plane saying the flight “gave me a new perspective of hurricanes.” Here’s what I saw this week when I took my first flight aboard one.
As of early afternoon, airlines in the United States had canceled more than 1,000 flights. More than 2,000 flights were delayed. Florida airports have been most affected, with multiple closing today through Friday. Delays are also rising at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, where the storm is expected to arrive early Friday morning.
Source: National Hurricane Center All times on the map are Eastern. Map shows probabilities of at least 5 percent. The forecast is for up to five days, with that time span starting up to three hours before the reported time that the storm reaches its latest location. Wind speed probability data is not available north of 60.25 degrees north latitude.By William B. Davis, John Keefe and Bea Malsky
Michael Bobbitt’s house in Cedar Key, Fla.Credit...Abigail Geiger for The New York Times
As the clock ticked closer to Helene’s landfall in Florida’s Big Bend, Michael Bobbitt made a pit stop at his white bungalow in the heart of Cedar Key, a small island community jutting perilously into the Gulf of Mexico.
Rain was falling there on Thursday morning, and the tides were beginning to rise. Mr. Bobbitt’s county, Levy, was already under mandatory evacuation orders.
But he had decided to stay to help the rescue and recovery efforts — whatever they may entail — alongside his friend Joey Larson, who had come up from his ranch in Odessa, a community some 70 miles south, near Tampa, to help with the effort.
Much of the community had evacuated, but there were still about 50 people left in Cedar Key, Mr. Bobbitt estimated. In his yard, a little blue boat called Buckeroo sat ready and waiting to be put to good use, along with a couple of golf carts.
Cedar Key is dotted with signs of past destruction: homes, restaurants and motels that were damaged, destroyed or replaced after Hurricane Idalia pummeled the community in August of last year.
Helene is the third hurricane to hit the Big Bend in 13 months — after Idalia came Hurricane Debby, which brought flooding to Florida last month.
“We fight the Gulf day in, day out,” said Mr. Bobbitt, a novelist and playwright. “But even the most stoic among us are worried to the point of calm. There’s a resignation here, now, that this might be it for us. That everything we’ve worked for could just be gone.”
Glenn Spaulding, 51, said that Idalia flooded his home with a few feet of water last year. Still, he said he planned to wait out Helene in the same spot, which is a bit inland from Cedar Key.
“I’ll ride it out, count the trees that fall,” he said. “It’s Florida.”
Before noon in Cedar Key, the Florida National Guard arrived to get a lay of the land and inform locals of the storm. Rescue operations can be difficult to navigate when it comes to people staying at home, said Capt. John Meacham.
“When the water gets to a certain level, we can’t do anything,” he said, adding that if people haven’t left by now, their mind is made up. “When people stay and get stuck, it’s putting more of a burden on everybody.”
As Mr. Bobbitt and Mr. Larson made their preparations on Thursday morning and discussed the damage wrought by Idalia last year, they worried that the coming storm would be even worse.
“So, the people who are staying here, why can’t we tell them to get out?” Mr. Larson said.
“They won’t,” Mr. Bobbitt said. “They just won’t.”
Helene is filling much of the eastern Gulf of Mexico with tropical storm-force winds of at least 39 miles per hour, stretching 345 miles from the center. The round shape and a clear eye indicate that the storm is intensifying vigorously. The far outer bands are bringing some of the first rounds of heavy rain to Florida.
Some streets and sidewalks in Shore Acres, a low-lying neighborhood of St. Petersburg were already covered with waterby noon Thursday, nine hours before Helene's storm surge was expected to peak. About half the homes in the area flooded during Hurricane Idalia last year.
Pecan crops are particularly vulnerable to damage from the hurricane as much of the crop is in the path of Hurricane Helene.Credit...David Goldman/Associated Press
Hurricane Helene is likely to damage tracts of farmland, just as the fall harvest is underway in Southern states like Georgia, sending farmers on a mission to salvage as much of their crops as possible before the storm lashes the region, they said.
The pecan crop is particularly vulnerable. Georgia produces 88 million pounds of pecans a year, more than any other state, according to the University of Georgia. The $400 million crop is mostly in the southern part of the state, which places it in the direct path of the storm.
Farmers who are just starting to harvest nuts in anticipation of the holiday baking season are worried. The big concern is wind, which can both blow nuts off branches before they are harvested and knock down trees. The earliest varieties were already being harvested, but most of the crop is usually gathered in October. Unlike an almond tree, which can start bearing nuts in three to five years, some varieties of pecan trees can take up to 25 years to mature.
Sunnyland Farms is in Albany, Ga., a city in the southwestern part of the state that calls itself the pecan capital of America.
“Unfortunately, this isn’t our first go-around,” said Alex Willson, the company’s president.
In 2018, Hurricane Michael took out 17 percent of the farm’s 1,700 trees and ruined the entire crop that season.
Cotton harvest in Georgia is just about at its peak, and farmers are trying to pull in as much of the $1.3 million crop before wind and rain damage the fragile cotton bolls.
Peanut farmers are also in the fields scrambling to dig up as many of the legumes as they can. Georgia grows more peanuts than any other state, and harvest is well underway. The Plains Peanut Festival in President Jimmy Carter’s hometown, Plains, Ga., is scheduled for this weekend Sept. 28. As of Thursday, organizers planned to go ahead with the event.
Florida farmers are preparing, too. It’s avocado season there, and high winds could knock fruit from the trees. Citrus farmers were tying down equipment and draining fields as much as possible in anticipation of several inches of rain.
“The preparation is not complicated. It’s just time-consuming and disruptive to what we need to be doing,” Steven B. Callaham, the chief executive of Dundee Citrus Growers Association, told the trade publication FreshPlaza.
Flooding dangers can include more than just water, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission warned on Thursday: The inundation could also bring more alligators and snakes to what is usually dry land.
In the event of a storm, alligators & snakes may be observed more frequently in areas with flooding. Keep them at a distance & give them space! #Helenepic.twitter.com/YPKRwdMwOK
The weather has been deceptively beautiful today in Gulfport, outside St. Petersburg, with blue skies and palm trees rustling in the breeze. With the center of the storm aiming farther north in Florida, the danger here is mainly from high water, and the stirm surge is not expected to peak until 9 p.m.
The water was near the top of the small seawall protecting houses at Dekle Beach, a small spot on Florida's Big Bend near the area where the storm may make landfall. “The tide will go out quick if it moves fast,”Jared Hunt, who owns a nearby gas station, said of the storm as he finished securing anything he couldn't clear away. “And hopefully, it moves fast.”
The 2024 Atlantic hurricane season was forecast to be exceptionally lively, and activity has picked up lately after an extended lull in August and September. Tropical Storm Isaac formed late Wednesday over the North Atlantic, but is not currently a threat to land. Meanwhile, in the eastern Pacific, Hurricane John is expected to make landfall in Mexico on Friday.
Helene is gaining strength, with winds of 105 m.p.h. now, according to the latest update from the National Hurricane Center. It will intensify until it reaches the coast this evening, forecasters said, and probably make landfall as a Category 3 or 4 storm.
Several cruise lines operating out of Florida’s west coast and the Gulf of Mexico altered their itineraries on Wednesday to avoid Hurricane Helene’s path.
Carnival Cruise Line canceled port stops at Cozumel, Mexico, for several ships, including Carnival Paradise, Valor, Breeze and Horizon. Two ships, Carnival Elation and Carnival Paradise, could not return to Jacksonville and Tampa after the ports were closed on Wednesday, but the cruise line said it tentatively expected ports to reopen on Friday, depending on its post-storm assessment.
“The safety of our guests and crew remains our priority, and our ships are sailing a safe distance from the storm,” Carnival said in a statement on Wednesday.
Royal Caribbean has also adjusted the itineraries of seven west Caribbean sailings, including Independence of the Seas, Grandeur of the Seas and Serenade of the Seas, which will be making port stops in Nassau, in the Bahamas, instead of Cozumel.
Guests onboard MSC Cruise line’s Seashore were informed that they would not be able to return to Port Canaveral in Florida on Thursday because of high winds and would instead have a bonus day at sea.
Southern Appalachia could see “numerous significant landslides” through Friday because of the storm, the National Hurricane Center predicted. “Any time there’s heavy rain in a relatively short amount of time, mudslides are a possibility,” said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University.
High water is flooding streets in Gulfport, just southwest of St. Petersburg, but it did not faze Joe and Steph Powless, who rode bicycles to the beach to check on conditions. “It’s just so common,” Joe Powless said. They live in a lowlying area under a mandatory evacuation order, but they are staying put, they said, along with most of their neighbors.
During a break from the rain in Port Richey, a coastal town northwest of Tampa, Holden Brush, 32, helped his girlfriend’s parents seal their garage. “It’s kind of eerie how it’s all quiet right now, before it’s going to get stormy,” he said.
Near Keaton Beach, southeast of Tallahassee, Donna and Greg Staab decided not to obey evacuation orders, and sat on their porch in the morning enjoying a cool breeze. They plan to head for a neighbor’s bomb-turned-hurricane shelter in the afternoon. “We’re just hoping for the best, that’s all you can do at this point,” Ms. Staab said. “Just stay and pray.”
Filling sandbags on Wednesday in Clearwater near St. Petersburg, Fla.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times
The pieces of paper taped to mailboxes and front doors on Wednesday carried a stark warning: “You must evacuate your mobile home by tomorrow morning due to Hurricane Helene.”
The Twin City mobile home complex in St. Petersburg was buzzing with activity Wednesday evening as people responded to the warning, which wasn’t much of a surprise to residents because their neighborhood has become increasingly prone to flooding over the last few years. Many were lifting cars onto concrete blocks, packing up their pets and preparing to leave the complex of tidy, pastel-colored homes.
But some planned to stay. Ryann Ivins, 59, walked his dog, Dexter, during a break in the rain. Helene’s approach made him nervous, he said, because last August, Hurricane Idalia brought hip-high water into the complex and inside his home. He recalled carrying Dexter, who can’t swim, through the floodwaters to higher ground at 4 a.m.
That storm cost him baby pictures of both himself and his children, as well as photos of the hot-rod cars he had built over the years. “It’s like half my life got erased,” he said.
A few months ago, he moved into a new trailer in the same complex. He bought brand new furniture for his two children, ages 10 and 11. Now, he’s worried about what Helene could do. So while he intends to stay through the storm to keep an eye on his belongings, he is taking other precautions.
“I already got my kids out of there,” he said. “I moved all my stuff up. And pray. That’s about all I can do at this point.”
He said he’ll go on living at Twin City as long as he can stand the rising waters.
“It was real nice for a while,” he said. “Then, all of a sudden, it started to flood.”
The loudest sound this morning in Crystal River is the whirring of power tools. Employees were boarding up shopping-center windows, and you could smell the freshly drilled and sawn plywood as you walked along the Main Street.
“It is going to be nasty throughout the latter part of the day here in the state of Florida,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news briefing, adding that there were 14 tornado warnings across the state overnight and that more were likely Thursday.
Tampa International Airport, St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport and Tallahassee International Airport are closed today. Hundreds of flights to and from Florida airports have been canceled.
Michael Bobbitt, a novelist and playwright, said he was staying in Cedar Key through the storm to help the elderly and infirm and anyone who becomes trapped. He said about 50 people remained behind on the island after most residents evacuated.
Abigail Geiger
Reporting from Florida's Big Bend coast
“We fight the Gulf day in day out,” Bobbitt said. “But even the most stoic among us are worried to the point of calm. There’s a resignation here now that this might be it for us.”
Boe Braccio, 48, turned off the power Thursday morning at the Crystal River marina he owns. The area has been hit by other storms recently, but “people were really, really concerned about this one,” he said. “This one, you’re concerned about the flood.” He pulled a large, heavy sign out of his truck, warning that the road to the marina was closed, and then drove away.
Tony Powell, 61, bicycled around the marina to check on how things had been secured. (The bike was necessary, he said, because everything else had been tied down or parked away.)
“That’s all you can do — get things out of harm’s way,” he added.
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Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Elisabeth Parker
Reporting from the Tampa Bay area
Rain bands are sweeping across Tarpon Springs, a coastal community north of the St. Petersburg-Clearwater area, and the water is rising along Whitcomb Bayou, even though high tide was two hours ago, at around 7 a.m.
Abigail Geiger
Reporting from Florida's Big Bend coast
Rain has started falling in Cedar Key, a small island community jutting perilously into the Gulf of Mexico. Many residents have already left, and buildings are boarded up.
Storm clouds on the horizon near St. Pete Beach, Fla., on Tuesday. Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images
What was once a broad cluster of storms in the Caribbean on Monday slowly coalesced into a hurricane on Wednesday. On Thursday, the intensity was ramping up.
In the span of 12 hours, Helene is expected to transform from a Category 1 hurricane Thursday morning to a Category 3 storm by Thursday afternoon, and forecasters warn it could intensify even more before landfall.
If the storm develops the way forecasters are predicting, it would signify “a pretty aggressive intensification,” Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, said this week.
Behind this potential rapid intensification is the “record-to-near-record-warm” ocean temperatures — which is “like high-octane jet fuel” for the storm — and a very fast change in wind heights, Mr. McNoldy said.
This month, the Gulf of Mexico is obliterating records for Ocean Heat content, according to records by Dr. McNoldy. Ocean heat content is a sort of fuel for hurricanes — the higher the amount, the greater the influence it can have on storms like Helene.
The water Helene is traversing Thursday is roughly the ideal temperature for a warm bath. The storm is moving directly over the Loop Current — a steady, strong current of warmer water that moves from the Caribbean and loops like a horseshoe in the eastern Gulf before moving through the straights of Florida. Storms traversing the Loop Current, like Hurricane Michael in October 2018, often get enough energy from the warm water to rapidly intensify.
In addition to the warm ocean temperature, storms tend to intensify “when winds don’t change a lot with height,” Mr. McNoldy said. Wind shear can separate the top of the center of the storm from the bottom, which keeps the eye from strengthening. With little shear forecast over the Gulf Thursday, the storm will likely intensify quickly.
At a storm briefing on Tuesday morning, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida expressed concern over the speed of the storm’s development.
“They’ve never in their history forecasted a major hurricane at this stage of development,” he said. “When it’s over the Gulf, especially the more north it goes rather than east, it has a chance to have a rapid intensification.”
Mr. McNoldy pleaded for people to re-evaluate how they were looking at weather forecast maps that often show the likely path of the storm as a cone stretch onto land.
But many people misinterpret the cone as “if I’m inside the cone it’s not good,” but “if I’m outside of the cone I’m fine,” he said. “That is absolutely not true.”
Pamela Andrews, a professor at Tallahassee State, carries sandbags to a car in as Hurricane Helene heads toward Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday.Credit...Sean Rayford/Getty Images
Tallahassee, Florida’s capital, is at least 30 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The National Weather Service has no record of the city ever sustaining hurricane-force winds.
But as of Wednesday, Tallahassee was under a rare hurricane warning, meaning hurricane conditions are expected as Hurricane Helene rolls through Florida’s Big Bend region late on Thursday.
And that raised an unusual set of concerns for the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis, namely: Is the structure that houses the state’s emergency operations center able to withstand a hurricane?
“This building has never really been tested,” Mr. DeSantis said during a news briefing from the center on Wednesday afternoon.
The walls were built to withstand a Category 5 storm — far stronger than what Helene would be over Tallahassee — but the roof was not built to quite the same level, Mr. DeSantis said. He added that officials nevertheless think the roof should at least hold up to 120 m.p.h. winds, the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane.
The governor said he and emergency staff intend to arrive at the center on Thursday and remain through the storm’s duration. Some emergency operations center staff will move farther west, to Escambia County in the western Florida Panhandle — and outside of Helene’s direct path — as backup. Mr. DeSantis said his family plans to stay in the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee, with shutters over the windows.
But Mr. DeSantis and Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, urged Tallahassee residents to consider whether they should evacuate. While the city is not under mandatory evacuation orders — which are usually issued in low-lying areas vulnerable to storm surge — its famously dense tree canopy means 40-foot pines could fall on roofs and make them collapse.
“This is a beautiful part of this region, these trees,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It’s nice, but they do represent a hazard.”
Mr. DeSantis cautioned residents that Helene was forecast to be “stronger than what we’ve seen in this region in anyone’s memory.”
Tallahassee, a city of about 200,000 people, saw sustained winds of 53 m.p.h. during Hurricane Kate in 1985, which caused extensive tree damage and lengthy power outages. Hurricane Hermine, in 2005, caused widespread power outages with 47 m.p.h. sustained winds in Tallahassee. And in 2018, Hurricane Michael (44 m.p.h. sustained winds) left 90 percent of the city and surrounding Leon County without power for up to a week.
Tallahassee residents appeared duly worried.
“It will not be safe where I’m at right now,” Kendall Cook, an 18-year-old student at Tallahassee Community College, said in an interview on Wednesday afternoon. “I’m surrounded by trees.”
At a local laundromat, Sawshia Lewis, a 38-year-old security guard, said her anxiety was “up pretty high.” She moved to Tallahassee from Texas about a year ago.
Her husband, Silas Lewis III, a lifelong Floridian, said he is used to hurricanes. But Mr. Lewis, 38, a truck driver, said he was on higher alert because Tallahassee was in Helene’s path.
“I’m praying for the best,” he said, “but I’m expecting the worst.”
Patricia Mazzei reported from St. Marks, Fla.; Abigail Geiger from St. Augustine, Fla.; Rachel Nostrant from Steinhatchee and Perry, Fla., and Elisabeth Parker from Tarpon Springs, Fla.
A resident prepares his home ahead of the possible arrival of Hurricane Helene in Port Richey, Fla.Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The immense task of preparing for Hurricane Helene, a storm so large that no part of Florida may be untouched by wind, rain or storm surge, fell disproportionately on Wednesday to the frustrated people of the Gulf Coast, whose memories of recent storms remain vivid.
They are people like Amy Bormann, a waitress who lives on a 30-foot sailboat in St. Marks, a tiny city on the northern Florida coast south of Tallahassee. During Hurricane Michael in 2018, she recalled, the storm surge rose higher than her head was.
“We’re tough down here,” said Ms. Bormann, 45, who also lived through Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.
But on Wednesday, as she helped pack grills and food into a trailer from the Cooter Stew, the burger joint where she works near where the Wakulla River meets the St. Marks River, she worried aloud that Helene, which is expected to make landfall late on Thursday, appeared to be heading directly toward St. Marks.
“It looks bad,” she said.
All of Wakulla County, which includes St. Marks, was under mandatory evacuation orders on Wednesday, as were several other coastal counties along the Big Bend region, the area where the peninsula and the Panhandle of Florida meet.
The worst of Helene’s storm surge — up to 18 feet — is expected along the marshy and sparsely populated Big Bend. Helene would be the third named storm to strike the region in 13 months, after Hurricane Idalia in August of last year and Hurricane Debby last month.
But Hurricane Helene is forecast to be much larger and stronger, and that has prompted storm warnings and evacuation orders in heavily populated areas hundreds of miles from the storm, such as Tampa and St. Petersburg, that are likely to be inundated.
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People fill sandbags in Clearwater, Fla.Credit...Ricardo Arduengo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“It’s just something we’re used to,” said Debbie Thompson, the manager of Katherine’s Linens & Gifts in Tarpon Springs, a city northwest of Tampa, as she gathered soaps from the bottom shelves of the store on Thursday. “Even with a regular storm, water comes into the store. We flood every time. All the clothing comes off the racks, and all the linens have to go up.”
Ms. Thompson said the store’s location, on one of the lowest spots on the town’s docks, was especially vulnerable. “We used to just take everything off the bottom shelves, but now we’re going higher,” she said, raising her hand to indicate waist height.
Hurricane Idalia, she said, was particularly devastating when it swept through last August. She scrolled through photos on her phone, showing an image of water inside the store.
“It brought in three feet of water,” she said. “It took two and a half weeks to get it all out.”
Before Idalia, a hurricane had not struck the Big Bend since 2016. Now, as residents prepare for the third storm in a little more than a year, they are feeling tired and frustrated.
“My initial gut reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, I cannot do this again,’” Hannah Healey said on Thursday as she finished packing up the Prickly Palm, a cafe that she owns in Cedar Key, a conglomeration of tiny islands connected by bridges that juts three miles into the gulf. “But I had to shift my perspective and told myself, ‘I have to do this — this is my reality.’”
Ms. Healey said she and other business owners had noticed the lingering effects of hurricane damage, and not just on properties. After Idalia, she said, the local chamber of commerce sent an email outlining how tourism had dropped 20 percent.
“Since that hurricane, we lost our R.V. park, we lost our hotel known for sunsets,” she said. “We lost a restaurant. We lost three huge businesses. And I felt that loss. I still have tourists come into my shop who say, ‘Oh, wow, I’m surprised you’re still open!’”
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A Wakulla County firefighter takes note of residents who plan to stay in their homes during Hurricane Helene in Panacea, Fla.Credit...Sean Rayford/Getty Images
“And I’m honestly so scared for — what does this town look like?” she continued. “Our tides are more extreme here, our weather is more extreme. I think we need to take a look at what Florida is doing. What is our future?”
In Steinhatchee, a small fishing town in the Big Bend that ended up covered in thick river mud after Idalia, most residents of the Coastal River R.V. Resort had already heeded mandatory evacuation orders by Wednesday afternoon. Only one person had chosen to stay, said Krysty Lynn, a resort employee.
Sheriff’s deputies had gone door to door earlier in the week urging residents to leave and warning them that no one might come if they needed help during the storm because conditions could be too unsafe for emergency workers.
Ms. Lynn, 54, was up at dawn on Wednesday readying the resort for Helene’s arrival. Part of her prep work was to secure burn piles of tree limbs and debris leftover from Hurricane Idalia.
“We’re exhausted,” said Ms. Lynn, whose purple shirt was drenched with sweat from the hard work. “It’s like as soon as we get everything put away, we have to put it back up.”
She said her biggest worry ahead of Helene was the high levels of the Steinhatchee River, which last year had been low when Idalia hit. Residents were told to expect up to 14 feet of flooding this time, she said — which would reach past even the elevated doors of campers and R.V.s.
Ms. Lynn evacuated to Orlando on Wednesday afternoon to wait out the storm with her granddaughter.
In Perry, a small city about 50 miles southeast of Tallahassee, Jennifer Loyd said she was planning to head out with some of her pets on Wednesday afternoon. The rest would have to stay behind at her farm, she said, noting that the storm was coming too fast and that there were too many animals for her to move.
“For Idalia we didn’t leave, but this year we’re leaving because it’s worse,” said Ms. Loyd, 41, who works at a local gas station. “Hopefully the dogs and cows will be OK.”
Tallahassee, the state capital, was under a rare hurricane warning. Sustained hurricane-force winds have not previously been recorded in the city, according to the National Weather Service.
While Tallahassee is further inland and not vulnerable to storm surge, its dense tree canopy puts it at risk of extensive damage to power lines and homes.
“Trees are deadly here,” said Jean Bates, 50, who has lived in Tallahassee for more than three decades and plans to stay home with her family through the storm.
Ms. Bates and her partner, Melissa Damelio, 42, were busy picking up their three children from elementary, middle and high school on Wednesday afternoon after the Leon County Schools ordered early closures to give families time to evacuate or finish preparations.
“We have an elder mom in the house, so it makes it harder to be able to leave,” said Ms. Damelio, a nursing teacher. “I think we’re safest here in a basement,” Ms. Bates added.
In this part of the state, where the Big Bend turns into the Panhandle, residents did not invoke Hurricane Idalia as much as they did Hurricane Michael, the fierce Category 5 storm that devastated parts of the Florida coast in 2018.
Michael McGuire, 42, a lifetime St. Marks resident, remembers how the water in his old house got neck high during that storm. He recently built a new house, this one raised on stilts about 22 feet off the ground — a striking sight along the road to the river shore.
He, his boys and their dogs plan to stick around for Helene. They will take their car to high ground nearby and wait it out with their generator and stockpile of bottled water.
Valerie Crowder contributed reporting from Tallahassee, Fla.
The cockpit of the NOAA’s hurricane hunter aircraft nicknamed Kermit.Credit...Judson Jones/The New York Times
There is no in-flight entertainment, and yet my hosts in blue flight suits tell me to prepare for a show. I have been briefed to avoid gassy foods, and the sick sack is pointed out to me.
I am about to take flight aboard one of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane hunter aircraft, nicknamed Kermit. It’s one of two WP-3D Orion turboprop airplanes that NOAA operates out of Lakeland, Fla. Kermit is older than me, having flown through its first hurricane in 1976, and it has the names of over a hundred hurricanes painted on its belly.
The Air Force Reserve’s 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron and NOAA operate hurricane hunter planes that fly into or over active storms. One of theirs will be in the storm at the same time as Kermit, but flying at 5,000 feet while we cruise around 10,000 feet. Another, an upper-altitude plane, called Gonzo, will be flying even higher above us, surveying the upper-level winds of the storm.
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The reporter following weather for The New York Times, Judson Jones, standing before one of the aircraft operated by NOAA.Credit...Judson Jones/The New York Times
It is hard to miss the NOAA planes, dark blue and stark white, the colors often associated with the weather that they are chasing, and which are also found in the government agency’s logo.
These planes fly specific missions to provide crucial data for computer weather models but they also relay current conditions of the storm to forecasters at the hurricane center. They use multiple kinds of radar to create a 3-D view of the storm, giving forecasters an MRI-like view of a storm.
Then, they drop instruments called dropwindsondes, which are inserted into a tube and released from the plane during flight. They are sensors that parachute through the storm and relay data like pressure and wind measurements back to the aircraft as it makes its descent to the ground.
The objective this afternoon will be to help identify the exact location of the center of the storm, and to analyze its structure and determine if it is beginning to resemble a hurricane. The data will be crucial to understand just how powerful this storm may become on Wednesday.
When potential tropical cyclone 9 officially became Tropical Storm Helene late on Tuesday morning, forecasters who had been watching the storm’s recent development from a swirl of thunderstorms in the western Caribbean Sea were able to begin piecing together more information about how big Helene might grow — and where it might go next.
Helene’s center was identified late on Tuesday morning, and that can have a significant influence on the forecast track of the storm. It gives forecasters and computer models a more accurate place to start from. And so the puzzle pieces began to fit together enough for forecasters to have some confidence in saying that Helene will likely turn into a major hurricane before making landfall along Florida’s Big Bend.
The storm’s center can wobble and move before it strengthens into a hurricane, said John Cangialosi, a senior hurricane specialist with the National Weather Service, on Tuesday. The track guidance from weather models is very tightly clustered, which typically means forecasters would have strong confidence in where the storm will go. Until now, it has not been easy to locate a center, and those models might be off slightly. So forecasters warned in an update on Tuesday to prepare for the possibility that the entire guidance could shift east or west.
Some models show the storm growing weaker and tracking west, and others much stronger and east. At the same time, most show something in between and point at the Big Bend. All of these solutions are on the table, and a high-altitude hurricane hunter flight took off from Florida early on Tuesday afternoon to investigate the steering currents and hopefully provide data that will help the later computer models.
The storm is also forecast to become a major hurricane, meaning that it could be a Category 3 or higher, with wind speeds of at least 111 miles per hour. This, too, could change, with some outliers showing a more vigorous storm and some showing a weaker hurricane or even a tropical storm.
One thing forecasters are growing confident of, Mr. Cangialosi said, is that this storm will be a vastly large hurricane, possibly similar in size to Irma and Katrina, which caused widespread damage. That means the storm surge, wind and rainfall effects will extend well away from the center, particularly on the east side.
A storm this size could potentially put large populations, like those living in the Tampa Bay area, at risk for damaging winds and surge that they didn’t experience during Idalia, a 2023 storm with a similar track and intensity as what is forecast for Helene. Idalia was much smaller. It also means that damaging winds may reach farther inland to cities like Tallahassee.
Like Francine a couple of weeks ago, Helene faces a deadline. If it doesn’t become a hurricane by Wednesday morning, it might not have enough time to reach Category 3 strength before making landfall.
On Tuesday morning, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida warned people about the uncertainty of the forecast models. “It’s important that people don’t get wedded to these cones,” he said. You could be out of the cone, he added, “and still have major impacts.” Speaking from the state’s emergency operations center in Tallahassee, Mr. DeSantis said the fact that the National Hurricane Center forecast a major hurricane — Category 3 or higher — before the storm even formed indicated that it could quickly intensify in the deep, warm Gulf waters.
“There’s still a lot of uncertainty here,” he said, urging Floridians to make storm preparations now. “People should just know that this is out there.”
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