Bob Weisberg's colleagues have developed models that look at storm surge. And fortunately, he said, the storm is expected to come closest to the Tampa Bay area at low tide.
“So the good news is that given the projected speed at which the storm is moving and when surge will peak here, it, it's going to coincide, more or less, with low tide,” he said. “So we luck out in that regard.
But, he noted, Helene is a very wide storm, with tropical storm winds more than 120 miles from the eye.
“The aircraft reconnaissance flights (Thursday) morning basically showed hurricane winds extending about 2 degrees of longitude to the east of the storm,” Weisberg said. “So we're going to have stronger winds here than what had been projected. And they may even reach hurricane-force winds here.”
Weisberg spoke from his Tierra Verde home just before he was evacuating to stay with his grandchildren.
“If you look at the storm surge simulations that my group has done - that's my former group, I'm an emeritus - it's suggesting that along the coast, sea level could be about 4.5 feet higher than the last high tide. So that's a substantial surge,” he said. “So I'm actually about to vacate my house because I think there'll be water in my garage. I want to get the cars out of here.”
So Weisberg had a few more predictions about the effects of Helene on our area:
“And I think the northeast of St. Pete's going to have problems. I think Davis Islands, even, even in Tampa, there's going to be flooding in a lot of places. And, Bayshore (Boulevard) will have water on it and it'll probably get to the lawns of the houses across the street. And there'll be some flooding on Davis Islands. There'll be some flooding in Channelside, the houses just to the north of the Courtney Campbell Causeway on the east side, there'll be some flooding there. You know, all the low-lying areas will suffer a little bit on the storm. Yeah, it's not going to be pretty,” he said.
Weisberg said the storm surge should peak late this evening or early Friday morning.
“It's just such a wide storm. That's what caught my attention. It's stronger than Idalia, but it's, it's bigger, it's just a bigger storm. The last time we had a really big storm was Katrina back in 2005 and it basically wiped out the entire coast of Mississippi,” he said. “You'll recall all the talk was about New Orleans, but the real story was coastal Mississippi. So, like somebody took an eraser and just wiped it clean.”
And that, Weisberg said, could mean big trouble for the Big Bend area that was battered by Hurricane Idalia one year ago.
