Gov. Ron DeSantis will travel Tuesday to areas hit by Hurricane Debby, as flood risks increase from the storm dumping rain in North Florida and Georgia.
Debby made landfall about 7 a.m. Monday as a Category 1 storm in Steinhatchee in Taylor County. As forecast, it produced large amounts of rain and storm surge without packing catastrophic winds. The system slowed once overland and inched across the Georgia border at 7 mph in a north-northeast direction.
“The hazards from this system are far-reaching and will be long-lasting,” Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said Monday afternoon during a briefing at the state Emergency Operations Center. “Depending on the type of basin and the type of river that we're dealing with … this is going to be about a week-long event that we're going to be monitoring.”
Debby had maximum sustained winds of 80 mph at landfall and was downgraded to a tropical storm by 11 a.m. as it moved slowly across North Florida. While additional weakening was expected, tropical-storm warnings were issued for numerous areas, including Alachua, Baker, Bradford, Columbia, Duval, Nassau, Putnam, St. Johns and Union counties.
At least four deaths were attributed to the storm, with two in Dixie County and one in Hillsborough County involving vehicle crashes, officials said.
The Hillsborough crash involved the driver of a tractor-trailer who lost control and became submerged in the Tampa Bypass Canal at Interstate 75 and Fowler Avenue.
In Levy County, a teen died after a tree crashed through the roof of a mobile home.
About 250,000 utility customers had power outages Monday afternoon, and electricity had been restored to 322,000 customers.
Guthrie said the Division of Emergency Management had started coordinating with counties about their needs and on Tuesday will begin damage assessments with homeowners.
The White House over the weekend announced a federal disaster declaration for the storm, providing assistance mostly to cover county evacuation and sheltering costs. The state was working to expand the declaration to include assistance for debris removal, Guthrie said.
DeSantis said he will be on the road Tuesday to see areas that sustained damage. He noted contrasts with the more-powerful Hurricane Idalia in 2023 and Hurricane Ian in 2022.
“The good thing is that there's not really a place where you would do a big tour of the damage compared to what we saw with Idalia and certainly what we saw with Hurricane Ian,” DeSantis said.
Debby followed a similar path as Idalia, which made landfall nearly a year ago in Taylor County as a Category 3 hurricane. Ian hit Southwest Florida in September 2022 as the fifth-strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in the contiguous U.S.
“There’s still risks. There's a risk from a lot of water. But from a wind perspective, this (Debby) was not at the level of the previous storms that we've seen in this state,” DeSantis said. “So, all in all, especially given that these folks had already been hit 11 months ago, we’re glad that we're getting reports that were not seeing a lot of widespread wind damage.”
