People shovel sand into bags in preparation for a storm heading toward the Florida peninsula.Chris O'meara/The Associated Press
A storm system brewing over Cuba on Friday will likely dump torrential rains over the Florida peninsula this weekend, a forecast that’s especially concerning for low-lying coastal and urban areas that were inundated by dangerous floods this year.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said there’s a 90 per cent chance it will strengthen into a tropical storm by Saturday night as it curves northward just off the southwest Florida coast, where the water has been extremely warm, with temperatures approaching 33 Celsius this week.
The hurricane centre has labelled it Potential Tropical Cyclone Four for now. The next name on this season’s list is Debby. “Regardless of development, heavy rains could cause areas of flash flooding across Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas through the weekend,” its advisory said.
It doesn’t take a name for flooding to become dangerous. Torrential rains from a tropical disturbance in June left many Florida roads impassable, swamping school buses and stranding residents as cars floated away down flooded streets.
“Hurricanes aren’t the only problem, right?” said Tom Frazer, executive director of the Florida Flood Hub for Applied Research and Innovation at the University of South Florida.
“We can have very rapidly developing storm systems that take advantage of extremely warm sea waters and high water content in the atmosphere to deposit large amounts of rain on various parts of the peninsula,” Mr. Frazer said.
Forecasting models predict it could come ashore as a tropical storm on Sunday and cross over Florida’s Big Bend region into the Atlantic Ocean, where it’s likely to remain a tropical storm threatening Georgia and the Carolinas early next week.
At a county park in Plant City east of Tampa, there was a steady stream of people shovelling sand into bags Friday morning. Terry Smith, 67, filled 10 bags with a neighbour from StrawBerry Ridge Village, a 55+ community of manufactured homes in suburban Hillsborough County.
Mr. Smith said he isn’t overly concerned about the storm, though he doesn’t have home insurance.
“Life is a risk,” Mr. Smith said. “We’re just probably going to try and stay in Saturday and Sunday and ride it out.”
In Fort Lauderdale, the flooding in June was so bad that the city has kept open sites where residents can fill up to five sandbags a day until further notice.
“The most significant impact from this storm will be the rainfall. Hefty totals are forecast over the next five days, with the bulk coming Saturday-Monday in Florida,” University of Miami meteorologist Brian McNoldy noted on X.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for most Florida counties, extending from the Florida Keys up through Central Florida and the Tampa Bay region and into the western Panhandle.
Mr. DeSantis spoke of sea level rise and the threat it poses to Florida during his first term as governor, but that message quieted after he won re-election and ran for president. Despite record heat and increasingly costly hurricanes, Mr. DeSantis recently signed legislation that erases most references to climate change in state law and nullifies goals of transitioning the state towards cleaner energy.
Meanwhile, far off Mexico’s western coast, Hurricane Carlotta formed over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, with top sustained winds reaching 140 kilometres an hour. The hurricane centre said Carlotta was moving west about 820km west-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula, and no watches or warnings were in effect.