Category 4 Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region on Thursday night, bringing with it deadly winds of 140mph and a “catastrophic” storm surge.
Helene made landfall at 11.10pm ET at Perry, Florida, just east of the mouth of the Aucilla River, the National Hurricane Center said in an update.
“This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation,” the National Hurricane Center stated an hour before the storm roared ashore. “Persons should not leave their shelters and remain in place through the passage of these life-threatening conditions.”
The center says that storm surge in areas near Helene’s landfall could be as high as 20ft and be “unsurvivable” in some areas.
More than 800,000 customers in Florida and Georgia were without power as Helene prepared to make landfall, according to PowerOutage.US.
Some counties in the Big Bend area halted emergency service operations as the storm bore down.
Helene will remain a hurricane as it moves into southern Georgia overnight before weakening and ending up in Tennessee on Friday afternoon as a tropical storm.
A state of emergency was declared in 61 of Florida’s 67 counties with several placed under evacuation orders.
Earlier, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that one person had been killed when a sign fell and hit a vehicle on Interstate 4 in the Tampa area.
“So that just shows you that it’s very dangerous conditions out there,” the governor said in a news conference in Tallahassee. “You need to be, right now, just hunkering down. Now is not the time to be going out.”
DeSantis predicted that Floridians would wake up on Friday and find it “very likely there’s been additional loss of life.”
He added: “You’re going to have people who are going to lose their homes because of this storm,” DeSantis said.