August 31, 2023 Tropical storm Idalia news

Small business owners along a commercial street in Crystal River, Florida, are cleaning up a day after Hurricane Idalia swept through the area.

Anthony Altman, who owns EXPLORIDA, an ecotourism company that offers manatee and scalloping tours, was hard at work Thursday cleaning the inside of his shop, which sustained water damage.

Altman told CNN he prepared well ahead of the storm after seeing the weather forecast and realizing his business would likely be in its path.

“The Gulf of Mexico is 92 degrees. We have scallop tours out there every day and we knew the gulf temperature was going to be (a) very warm environment, because the storm that popped up very fast was coming toward the ocean. We knew this storm was going to be very large,” Altman said. 

Faced with the possibility of losing his business, Altman said he rented a truck and moved his merchandise out before the storm arrived. That move likely saved him thousands of dollars in lost property, and he said he was able to "minimize most of the damage."

Altman, who has lived and worked in the Crystal River area for several years, said he’d been shocked to see just how much the temperatures in the gulf had risen this summer. 

“We were at the end of summer and the Gulf temperature was 92 degrees. It’s happened in the past, but this year was the hottest it’s been in my lifetime at this time of year. So we knew that this was going to be maybe a very aggressive storm,” Altman said.  

He and his employees hope to reopen soon. 

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell briefed President Joe Biden by phone while surveying damage from Hurricane Idalia, FEMA spokesperson Jeremy Edwards said in a statement.

“While surveying damage in Florida caused by #Idalia, @FEMA Administrator Criswell briefed @POTUS over the phone about the situation on the ground & provided an update on response efforts,” Edwards wrote in the post on X, which included a photo of Criswell on the ground in Florida. “This Saturday, she will be with POTUS when he comes to see the devastation firsthand.”

Biden directed Criswell to travel to Florida after Idalia made landfall Wednesday.

The president announced Thursday that he will travel to the area this weekend while thanking FEMA employees at DC headquarters for their response.

 

Residents spent Thursday clearing piles of debris from homes and businesses in the hard-hit island town of Cedar Key, Florida, starting the long recovery after it was pummelled by Hurricane Idalia.

Residents were allowed to return on Wednesday. They said electricity has been restored but there is no running water. The temperature felt like 97 degrees on Thursday as residents sifted through the debris.

Several houses along the water were destroyed, while dwellings further inland appeared untouched. Large piles of wood and trash lined the streets. 

Greenwood, a manager at a bed and breakfast, said she was relieved to find the property, which was built in 1880, suffered minimal damage.

“It’s on one of the highest points of the island. The storm surge would have had to be above 15 feet (to reach it),” Greenwood said.

An ocean gauge measured a storm surge closer to 9 feet. 

After storming ashore in Florida as a Category 3 storm early Wednesday, Idalia has swept out to sea off the coast of North Carolina.

Idalia was the most powerful hurricane to slam the Big Bend region of Florida's Gulf Coast in more than a century. Thousands of homes were damaged — some with shredded walls and roofs, others with murky, waist-high floodwater that officials warn could be dangerous for days to come.

Florida officials say that although there is damage, residents largely listened to evacuation orders and stayed out of harm’s way. 

Now a massive cleanup is underway in Florida as well as across parts of Georgia and North Carolina.

Here's what it's like in some of the hard-hit areas:

• Big Bend, Florida: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Idalia caused "significant damage" in the Big Bend region, the nook between the panhandle and peninsula. The governor toured the area with Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell. He said he saw a lot of flooding, but he said many of the coastal homes were not damaged because of design allowed them to withstand the storm surge.
• Cedar Key, Florida: Idalia brought a record storm surge that flooded much of the island, lifting up and tossing old homes into the Gulf of Mexico, strewing the streets and beach with chairs, microwaves, hairdryers and other debris, and inundating much of the waterfront commercial district. Even so, early warnings and people heeding a mandatory evacuation order prevented any loss of life, city officials said.
• Pasco County, Florida: First responders rescued about 150 people from flooded neighborhoods in the county, which is situated north of Tampa, the county fire rescue chief said. Some areas saw water surges between 3 and 5 feet. Between 4,000 and 6,000 homes were inundated with water, county administrator Mike Carballa said.
• Georgia: There is one confirmed storm fatality in Georgia after a tree fell on a vehicle in Lowndes County during the hurricane, according to Georgia Emergency Management Director Chris Stallings. There were also "a lot of minor injuries" related to the storm, Stallings said. Recovery efforts continue across the state and Gov. Brian Kemp is scheduled to visit South Georgia on Friday, state officials said.
• Carolinas: South Carolina Charleston Harbor saw water spike to higher than 9 feet, making it the fifth highest level ever recorded, according to the National Weather Service. Between 2 and 5 inches of rain fell across portions of the southeastern parts of North Carolina, including the Wilmington area.

Here's what else to know:

• The latest forecast: Any rain from Idalia is forecast to be out over the Atlantic Ocean by early Friday evening. A slight breeze may persist along the Atlantic coast, but damaging winds will cease. Rough seas and rip current dangers will continue along the East Coast. 
• Hot temperatures: Tens of thousands of people in northern Florida and southern Georgia still without power will have to suffer through sweltering summertime heat. High temperatures across the area are expected to climb into the lower 90s on Thursday afternoon. Idalia's rain is causing the heat index to soar.
• Biden plans to visit: President Joe Biden will travel to Florida on Saturday morning, the president said Thursday. He also pledged long-term support and called on Congress to pass more disaster funding. Earlier Thursday, Biden formally declared a major disaster in Florida and approved an emergency declaration for the state of South Carolina.

President Joe Biden is pledging long-term support to communities in Florida that are cleaning up after Hurricane Idalia hit the state's northwestern areas this week.

Biden, speaking at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, on Thursday, said responding to such disasters while they are happening is “just the beginning.”

“Some of this is going to take months and years to make sure we restore the people to the circumstances there before this disaster hit,” Biden said.

Biden said he will travel to Florida on Saturday morning. The president will "visit the areas most impacted by the hurricane,” White House Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall later said.

The president has been “talking daily,” with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, who traveled to Florida yesterday after the hurricane made landfall in the state, according to Sherwood-Randall.

Earlier Thursday, the president formally declared a major disaster in Florida. This makes federal funding available to people in several counties hit by the storm. During the hurricane, the Biden administration also deployed personnel and resources.

“To the people of Florida, throughout the Southeast, I'm here to make clear our nation has your back,” he said. “We're not going to walk away, we're not going to give up, not going to slow down.”

Biden also called on Congress to pass funding for the federal Disaster Relief Fund "to be able to continue to show up and meet the needs of the American people to deal with immediate crises that we're facing right now, as well as the long-term commitments we have to make to finish the job in Maui and elsewhere."

The president made a sideswipe at lawmakers who’ve questioned the need for additional funding for FEMA, asking how, in the wake of twin disasters this month — Hurricane Idalia and the Maui wildfires — anyone could doubt the need for more funding.

CNN’s DJ Judd contributed reporting to this post.

Anna King, a Florida restaurant and hotel owner, has a daunting cleanup ahead, after her business was flooded with 4 feet of water after Hurricane Idalia tore through the area.

"We got 3 feet of water in the restaurant, 4 in the hotel rooms," said King, who owns Fiddler's Restaurant and Resort in Steinhatchee, a hard-hit town in western Florida. "We've got debris everywhere, 3 to 4 inches of just like this silt-y mud that is awful-smelling. We were very fortunate we didn't have any structural damage, just a lot, a lot of cleanup."

She told CNN that crews are at the scene providing ideas on how the establishment should move forward and that she foresees the damages will cost her nearly half a million dollars. King said she thinks the hotel rooms and restaurant will need a full gut renovation.

Despite the price tag, King is giving back to her community. She said she is trying to procure propane cookers so the restaurant can offer warm meals to people. King also plans to use the restaurant's wedding center as an area where residents can take a break and also talk to insurance agents.

Hurricane Idalia caused "significant damage" after it ripped into Florida's Big Bend with 125 mph winds and record-setting storm surge, but the storm's evolution before landfall likely prevented an even worse disaster, Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center told CNN.

On Wednesday morning, with the storm just 20 miles and 45 minutes from landfall, the hurricane center announced Idalia's winds dropped 5 mph because it was undergoing an eyewall replacement cycle.

An eyewall replacement cycle is akin to a snake shedding its skin. Strong hurricanes can shed a smaller eyewall — the ring of most intense winds that surrounds the hurricane's calm eye — in favor of a larger one. During this process, the storm's winds can weaken, but when the process is complete, the storm will be larger and can then start to intensify even further.

Idalia's landfall kept this process from completing, preventing the hurricane from being even larger and more intense than forecast at landfall.

But even an incomplete eyewall cycle could have had a "massive" effect on what people experienced, Rhome said. The hurricane's structure was changing, which affected where the strongest winds were set up and who got the worst surge as a result.

Idalia’s wind field was expanding during the eyewall replacement cycle, which means it may have broadened the scope of the surge at the expense of its peak intensity.

The cycle “would dramatically change where surge happens," Rhome said. "I can't put into words just how sensitive surge is to the wind. Not just the wind speed, but also the wind direction, too. These structural changes can also change the angle of the wind, which can have dramatic impacts on the surge or the timing of the wind (and the surge) relative to the tide."

The tides were another key factor in the severity of the surge, especially in a place like Cedar Key.

"The other thing that happened with Cedar Key is the (storm's) timing changed," Rhome said. "It, luckily, luckily came in at low tide, which probably whacked, you know, four feet off of it (the surge totals), just with that."

Hurricane Idalia caused billions of dollars in damage, but the price tag won’t be nearly as high as other major hurricanes, Moody’s Analytics said Thursday.

According to preliminary cost estimates from Moody’s, Hurricane Idalia caused between $12 billion and $20 billion of damage and lost output.

For context, last year's Hurricane Ian, which made landfall in western Florida as a Category 4 storm, caused an estimated $112.9 billion of total damage in the United States, according to the National Hurricane Center. That made it the third-costliest US hurricane on record. 

The damage this time would have been greater if not for two factors: The relatively fast speed Idalia moved through the region and where it made landfall.  

“Unlike other recent events, the bulk (of the cost) comes not from a handful of counties that were decimated but instead a large, multi-state area experiencing significant but not catastrophic damage,” Adam Kamins, director of regional economics at Moody’s Analytics, wrote in a report on Thursday. 

Kamins said it was “fortuitous” that the storm made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend, a region with fewer people and structures than other areas that have been hit by major natural disasters. 

Kamins noted that property values in the Big Bend are lower than the rest of the state. That is also suppressing damage estimates. 

“Idalia may not go down in history as an especially costly event, but as climate change leads to more frequent storms that can intensify rapidly, events like it will grow more common over time,” Kamins wrote in the report. 

Moody’s RMS plans to release official estimates of insured losses in the next two weeks. 

Florida officials said Hurricane Idalia did not cause greater damage or loss of life because of local warnings and prepared residents.  

Kevin Guthrie, director of Florida Division of Emergency Management, said state and local officials stressed to residents that if they needed power, they had to evacuate.

"It seems that people have heeded that call, and we're grateful for that," Guthrie said on Thursday.

"I think those officials in those really hard-hit counties ... did a good job. I think citizens responded very appropriately," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said.

DeSantis said although there is storm damage from Idalia in the state, residents listened and stayed out of harm’s way. 

"It's probably something that most people would not have bet on ... four or five days ago knowing how strong the storm was going to get," the governor said. "My hat's off to the people on the ground there, who did a good job."  

He added that the forecast was "pretty solid" in comparison to what happened with Hurricane Ian last year, when the track shifted "in a matter of 48 hours ... migrating all the way down (to) southwest Florida."

Florida officials are working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency "to expedite recovery processes and ensure we can assist the Big Bend with needed recovery efforts," Guthrie added.