MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
One of the largest hurricanes on record is roaring north through the Gulf of Mexico off the West Coast of Florida this morning.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Hurricane Helene is forecast to grow to a Category 4 storm when it slams into Florida's Big Bend region this evening.
MARTIN: NPR's Frank Morris is in St. Petersburg, and he's going to bring us up to date. Good morning, Frank.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Hi, Michel.
MARTIN: So we've been keeping an eye on this, as you certainly have. Helene seems to be gaining in power and size. Would you just talk about the scope of what people are facing?
MORRIS: Yeah, the storm is enormous. Only four hurricanes this century have been this big over the Gulf - as big as Helene is expected to grow today. Forecasters have the entire coast of Florida - the west coast of Florida under a storm surge warning. Sixty-one of the state's 67 counties are under a state of emergency. In Tampa, a little more than halfway up Florida's Gulf Coast, the surge could shove 8 feet of moving water through low-lying areas. Across the bay in St. Petersburg yesterday evening, people like Tracy Rajewski were just taking it in stride and stocking up on essentials.
TRACY RAJEWSKI: Wine (laughter) and ice cream, yeah. Luckily, I'm pretty high up, so we usually don't have any flooding or anything. So, yeah, I'm kind of used to the drill. Got the water. Got the bathtub full. Make sure everything's charged up and download some movies on my phone just in case.
MORRIS: The storm surge is expected to be much worse farther north, where Helene will make landfall. There, forecasters say the storm surge could be, quote, "catastrophic and deadly." It could be 20 feet - what meteorologists are calling unsurvivable.
MARTIN: So what about people in Florida's Big Bend region? What should they be doing?
MORRIS: Right. That's where the storm's going to hit, and the prudent thing to do is leave. In fact, many counties there are under mandatory evacuations. Many others are under voluntary evacuations. Of course, in every hurricane, there are people who ignore those evacuation orders. And afterwards, a lot of times, they say they'll never do that again. So we caught up with Florida Senator Rick Scott in Apalachicola yesterday. He's a former governor with lots of hurricanes under his belt, and he says he's warning people to get out.
RICK SCOTT: Right here in Apalachicola, they're thinking about 10 feet of storm surge. That's almost twice my height. In the Big Bend, they're talking about 18 feet. You don't survive 6 foot of storm surge. And the water is what kills you. You know, mostly it's water now that kills you. And so I hope everybody will take this seriously. Listen to the locals. If you think you're going to have to evacuate, get out now.
MARTIN: And then there is the wind. The National Hurricane Center says it expects Helene to be a major Category 4 hurricane when the eye of the storm makes landfall tonight. That actually just sounds really frightening, Frank.
MORRIS: Right. Yeah, when the storm hits, it's going to be packing sustained winds of 130 miles an hour, with higher wind gusts, and it could be even stronger. And Helene is - fast-moving hurricane. It's not going to slack off much as it moves inland. And Tallahassee, about 25 miles up the coast, could see wind gusts of more than a hundred miles an hour. The storm is likely to blow down trees and knock out power over a huge area, fanning out hundreds of miles inland as it sweeps into Georgia and Carolinas and possibly stalls out over Tennessee and Kentucky. Jamie Rhome with the National Hurricane Center said the scale of the wind damage will be enormous.
JAMIE RHOME: We don't normally issue tropical storm warnings this far inland or for this part of the country - blanketing the entire state of Georgia, the entire state of South Carolina in western periphery or the mountains of North Carolina with tropical storm winds.
MORRIS: Rhome says about half the hurricane deaths are from inland flooding.
MARTIN: That is NPR's Frank Morris in St. Petersburg, Fla. Frank, thank you.
MORRIS: Thank you, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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