Category 4 Hurricane Helene tore up the Big Bend, barreling to land south of Perry in Taylor County, as Gov. Ron DeSantis predicted the “real deal” storm would earlier in the day it arrived.
As the Governor addressed media Thursday night upon landfall at Deckle Beach, DeSantis reassured listeners that help is on the way to a county that has been hit by three hurricanes in a little more than a year.
“We’re here, we’re going to face this storm in Tallahassee,” DeSantis said. “When it’s safe to kind of be liberated from here, we’ll be out and about coordinating response.”
A big part of that response will be restoring electricity to the more than one million Floridians without electricity as of late Sept. 26. The Governor promised linemen for power restoration would be in the field “probably as soon as there’s light out.”
“I think they’re going to get a lot done,” DeSantis added. “The priority is to get power restored as quickly as possible.”
Also among those responses are matters of life and death themselves.
“‘The state is ready to commence search and rescue,” DeSantis said, citing 3,500 National Guard members on hand, along with state troopers and the State Guard.
With flooding far south of the storm’s landfall, missions are expected to be undertaken out of necessity, given that some didn’t evacuate low-lying areas prone to routine flooding exacerbated by the historic storm surge.
One storm casualty has already been recorded away from the landfall in Ybor City: a motorist whose car was “hit when a sign fell on the highway.”
But as DeSantis told the media, he expects more people to become “fatalities” in the hurricane’s wake, given the dangers posed by a storm that is “this big and this strong.”
“There’s so many different things that can happen. This one was some car driving on the roadway and something falls on you. You know, we are going to have trees falling. We’re going to have potentially have people maybe against advice, go out on the roadways. We may have some more road and you may have had folks get caught up in storm surge. I mean, we don’t know, but I think it’s likely that one or some of those things will have happened by tomorrow,” DeSantis said.
While the state doesn’t “have any reports of any fatalities other than the one traffic fatality,” DeSantis expects “that will likely change as we get more and more reports through the wee hours of the night and into tomorrow morning.”
DeSantis urged people to “stay put” amid “hurricane-force winds that are going to extend across a couple of counties.”
‘Treat it almost as if a tornado,” he advised, noting that just because someone may be experiencing “a period of calm when you’re in the eye of the storm, the storm’s not done.”
Taylor County learned that lesson the hard way in an unlucky 13 months through Idalia, Debby, and now Helene.
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