‘You can’t survive this’: Hurricane Idalia strikes Florida’s most vulnerable coast
This year’s first major hurricane made landfall early Wednesday morning, bringing 125 mile per hour winds to Florida’s Big Bend region. Officials and residents told Grist that the sparsely populated coastal area, which stretches from near Gainesville to just south of Tallahassee, was wholly unprepared for Hurricane Idalia, a Category 3 storm fueled by exceptionally hot waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The area hasn’t been struck directly by a hurricane in more than a century.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Mandy Lemmermen, the battalion chief for the Dixie County fire department, who was hunkered down in an operations center in the county seat of Cross City when she spoke to Grist on Tuesday evening. “You can’t survive this.”
After taking shape in the Gulf of Mexico, Idalia underwent a process known as “rapid intensification,” swiftly …