While Florida is cleaning up from Hurricane Debby, the storm is still dumping record amounts of rain onto Coastal Georgia and South Carolina.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
South Carolina is bracing for a lot of rain and flooding over the next several days as Tropical Storm Debby meanders through the state. Debby hit Florida as a hurricane on Monday, then quickly lost strength. It’s now a wet and slow tropical storm which may dump what the National Hurricane Center is calling potentially historic heavy rains over Eastern South Carolina through Friday. NPR’s Greg Allen has been tracking this storm and joins us now. Hi, Greg.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: OK, so what is the latest on Debby right now?
ALLEN: Well, you know, Debby moved pretty quickly through Florida after making landfall yesterday morning. And now that it’s reached the East Coast, the area around the Georgia-South Carolina border, it’s slowed down significantly. The winds around 40 miles per hour can take down trees and power lines, especially if the ground is saturated. And you have significant power outages in Florida and Georgia, and the numbers are going up in South Carolina. But really, the big issue is going to be flooding. Debby may drop 20 or even 25 inches of rain in some areas there. And the flooding threat led Charleston’s mayor, William Cogswell, to order a curfew that will be in effect until at least tomorrow morning. Here he is.
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WILLIAM COGSWELL: We especially don’t need any yahoos driving through the water and causing damage to property. We have written a number of tickets, and we’ll continue to do so. So please stay home.
CHANG: No yahoos. OK – got it. There are some images on social media of street flooding in Charleston and other areas. What exactly is happening there?
ALLEN: Well, you know, that’s an area known as the Lowcountry. People there aren’t strangers to flooding. But Mayor Cogswell says that the measures taken before the storm, which included cleaning drains and installing more than a dozen pumps, have helped the city avoid severe flooding so far.
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COGSWELL: We’ve been fortunate to have no overly heavy bands coming through where we’re getting a large volume within, like, an hour or two. So that along with being lucky with the tides, I think, have kept the city relatively dry.
ALLEN: You know, but Debby’s going to hang around eastern South Carolina for another few days, dropping a lot of rain, so the flooding threat is not going away.
CHANG: Yeah. Well, meanwhile, Florida is cleaning up after Debby hit its Gulf Coast on Monday as a hurricane. How much damage is there?
ALLEN: Well, you know, Debby had 80-mile-per-hour winds when it hit Florida but lost strength quickly. It came ashore in a rural area on the coast – the Gulf Coast – just miles away from the spot where Hurricane Idalia made landfall about a year ago. Florida governor Ron DeSantis was in Steinhatchee today, where Debby made landfall. He said there have been four fatalities so far in Florida attributed to the storm. But DeSantis said the damage to homes and the debris left behind by Debby won’t be anywhere close to what we saw in Idalia.
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RON DESANTIS: Now, you are going to see some flood. We know there’s hundreds of homes in the Sarasota-Bradenton area, particularly along the river. We could see more homes in north central Florida as that water rises.
ALLEN: As Debby has moved inland, all the rain it’s dumping there will cause rivers to rise in the days ahead. That will also be the case in South Carolina, where the flash flooding threat will continue at least through Friday after Debby’s left the state. Debby’s then expected to pick up some speed after it gets in North Carolina Friday and will dump a bunch of rain on mid-Atlantic states and New England through the weekend.
CHANG: That is NPR’s Greg Allen. Thank you, Greg.
ALLEN: You’re welcome.
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