Lazaro Aleman
ECB Publishing, Inc.
Jefferson County is one of 25 counties listed on a state of emergency declaration that Gov. Ron DeSantis issued on Tuesday, Oct. 6, ahead of Tropical Storm Isaias.
“This order will allow the Florida Division of Emergency Management to stage critical preparedness resources and ensure Florida is ready to respond,” DeSantis said in a press release. “Floridians should take this time to get disaster plans in place and ensure their hurricane supply kit is stocked.”
The governor noted that the impacts of the storm could extend well beyond the point of landfall, with heavy rainfall, strong winds, coastal flooding and isolated tornadoes possible across North Florida.
Additionally, he said, precipitation from the storm could further saturate soils and increase the possibility of flash flooding, given the recent significant rainfall that the region has experienced.
The other counties included in the state of emergency declaration were Baker, Bay, Calhoun, Columbia, Dixie, Escambia, Franklin, Gadsden, Gilchrist, Gulf, Hamilton, Holmes, Jackson, Lafayette, Leon, Liberty, Madison, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, Suwannee, Taylor, Walton, Wakulla and Washington.
Isaias, the Atlantic season’s first hurricane, formed off the eastern coast of Mexico on Tuesday afternoon as a tropical depression and became a named tropical storm early Wednesday.
As of Wednesday morning, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), Isaias was located 935 kilometers southwest of the Mississippi River, was moving east northeast at eight mph with sustained winds of 40 mph, and was expected to strengthen rapidly over the next two days.
“A continued east-northeastward motion is expected today, followed by a turn toward the northeast and north on Thursday and Friday,” according to the NHC advisory at 4 a.m. Wednesday. “On the forecast track, Isaias is expected to pass to the north of the Yucatan Peninsula on Thursday and approach the U.S. northern Gulf Coast on Friday.”
The storm’s projected cone shows it potentially making landfall somewhere between the Alabama/Mississippi border and the Florida Panhandle as a category 2 hurricane by Friday.
Meanwhile, beginning on Friday and continuing through the weekend, Isaias was expected to produce rainfall amounts of 3 to 6 inches, with localized totals of up to 10 inches across the northern U.S. Gulf Coast from southeastern Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, the NHC reported
“Rainfall amounts of 1 to 3 inches, with localized amounts up to 5 inches, are possible across much of the Southeast as far north as the Tennessee Valley and the Carolinas, with flash and urban flooding also possible, along with isolated river flooding,” the NHC advisory stated.
Experts note that the Saffir-Simpson Scale solely measures the strength of a hurricane’s winds from category 1 to category 5, the strongest. To determine a storm’s true potential impact, however, its circumference, speed, the amount of rainfall it produce, and its storm surge and high tides must also be factored into the equation, meteorologists say.
Geography, they say, is also important, in terms of where a storm hits and its inland path. Potential damage assessments, they say, should additionally take into consideration a particular area’s geographic features, such as the density of the population, the quality of the infrastructure and the age of the homes and businesses. Also to be considered, they say, are other storm-related factors, such as the storm surge and tornadoes that a storm may spawn, regardless of its size.
When monitoring a storm, think locally, advised the experts, who encourage residents to seek more localized information by going to the National Weather Service’s homepage and typing a specific ZIP code to get a clearer picture of what’s happening in a particular area.