The increasingly powerful Hurricane Helene may not strike Tallahassee directly, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday morning, but the storm will likely still cause major damage to the capital region and along the state’s Gulf Coast.
DeSantis also said areas of Florida outside the storm’s forecast cone could also see “significant impacts,” citing tornado warnings in Palm Beach, Hendry, Glades and Collier counties in the south.
“If you’re in North Florida, you still have time to execute your plan, but you’ve got to do it now,” DeSantis said at the Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee. “You have time to get to a shelter, but you’ve got to do it now. Every minute that goes by brings us closer to having conditions that are going to be simply too dangerous to navigate.”
Strengthening Hurricane Helene targets Florida with ‘catastrophic’ wind, surge and tornado warnings
The National Weather Service predicted up to 20-foot storm surges in parts of the Big Bend region.
“Don’t wait another six hours, seven hours and say, ‘Oh man, this thing looks big,’ and think that you’re going to want to go out,” the governor said.
The time to leave in the central part of the state may be quickly closing, if not already passed, he added.
“If your local officials say that it’s too hazardous to go and that you’re better off just hunkering down, heed that advice,” DeSantis said. “With the winds we’re looking at the Skyway Bridge [across Tampa Bay] is having, I don’t know if they’ve closed it yet, but I think that was imminent.”
DeSantis noted that models of the hurricane’s path now show Tallahassee may be spared the worst of the severe winds around the storm’s eyewall. That was a change from Wednesday, when he talked about the possibility that the Emergency Operations Center itself may be under threat from potential Category 4-force winds.
“The models are nudging the center of the storm a little bit east, and that’s significant when you’re talking about Tallahassee, because I think yesterday we were looking at an eye wall that was probably just on the western part of the city when the storms hit,” he said.
The storm path could now be closer to the less populated areas in the Big Bend struck by Hurricane Idalia in 2023, DeSantis said.
“There’s no guarantee that it’s going to continue on that trend, but we have seen that slight trend, and that could potentially be very impactful if you’re talking another 30 or 40 miles to the east versus maintaining course or even toggling a little bit west,” DeSantis said.
The previous projection for a direct path through the capital, he said, had “not seen at that magnitude at Tallahassee in anybody’s lifetime. And if that were to happen, there is just going to be a lot of debris. It is going to push down a lot of trees, and it will cause significant damage.”
Asked how long power outages could be in Tallahassee, DeSantis had veiled criticism of his predecessor, now-U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, and his Democratic opponent in the 2018 election, then-Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, for how Hurricane Hermine was handled that year.
“I remember, I wasn’t governor, but when they had Hermine, that was not something that there was good preparation for,” DeSantis said.
Losses in Leon County exceeded $10 million that year, and power outages affected 325,000 people.
“On the local level, you had a lot of people that were without power for a long time,” he said. “That is not the way it’s being done this time. So I think that from local [government] on up, people are taking it really seriously, and we’re going to respond accordingly.”