Millions of residents were evacuated or hunkered down in homes and bunkers as Hurricane Idalia made landfall in Florida's Big Bend region as an "extremely dangerous" Category 3 storm on Wednesday, and authorities warned a life-threatening storm surge was possible.
Drawing strength from the Gulf of Mexico's warm waters, Idalia was forecast to unleash destructive winds and torrential downpours that will cause coastal flooding up to 16 feet (4.88 m) deep.
"Don't put your life at risk by doing anything dumb at this point. This thing's powerful," Governor Ron DeSantis said at an early news briefing in Tallahassee that was interrupted for a few seconds by a power cut.
The NHC said Idalia made landfall at 7:45 a.m. EDT (1145 GMT) at Keaton Beach, an ocean-front community of 13,000 people in Taylor County, about 75 miles (121 km) southeast of Tallahassee, the state capital. It is located in Florida's Big Bend region, where the state's northern Gulf Coast panhandle curves into the western side of the Florida Peninsula.
So this is crunch time right now.
We're gonna get hit with a major hurricane.
It'll be sometime the eye will arrive on shore
sometime tomorrow morning most likely.
And it is gonna have major impacts,
particularly along Florida's Big Bend region.
So listen to your local officials,
take the appropriate precautions
to protect you and your family.
Everywhere in the Big Bend is gonna get storm surge,
is gonna see major, major impact
whether the eye wall's hitting you or not.
So please prepare for that.
It is gonna be a significant, significant impact
to that region of Florida.
Now, if you are in an evacuation zone
and you've been directed to evacuate,
particularly if you're in a low lying area
or coastal area in that Big Bend region,
now's the time to do it.
This is gonna be something
that will leave significant impacts.
And particularly in this part of the state,
really got to go back to the late 1800s
to find a storm of this magnitude
that will enter where this one looks like
it's gonna enter tomorrow.
So we don't really have a historical analog
in anybody's memory.
So it's likely to cause a lot of damage
and that's just the reality.
So be prepared for that, be prepared to lose power
and just know that there's a lot of folks
that are gonna be there to help you get back on your feet.
