TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Powerful storms with hurricane-force winds killed at least one woman in Florida Friday, a week since severe weather The situation continued in the South, where uprooted trees crashed into homes and knocked out power to thousands of people in several states.
Tallahassee city officials said wind gusts of 80 to 100 mph (128 to 161 kph), speeds exceeding hurricane intensity, were reported in Florida’s capital. Images posted on social media showed mangled metal and other debris from damaged buildings littering some areas.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis released Friday a decree declaring a state of emergency in 12 counties in the northern part of the state affected by the storm.
A statement on the Tallahassee government website, crews were scrambling to repair 100 broken utility poles while half the homes and businesses were left without power in a city of 200,000. He said the National Weather Service was evaluating the paths of three potential tornadoes.
“Our region suffered catastrophic wind damage,” Tallahassee Mayor John Dailey said on the social platform X.
Crews informed customers in the dark that restoration could take days. City officials expect work to restore power to continue through the weekend.
Alison Faris, city spokesperson told the Tallahassee Democrat that the scale of the damage has made restoration difficult as crews focus on repairing transportation infrastructure before they can begin work on distributing the electricity that powers homes and businesses.
“Transmission first, then we get the circuits back on, which impacts distribution,” Faris told the Democrat. “Everyone is on transmission. We should start seeing some circuits repaired here soon.
The first wave of more than 215 employees from 20 utilities in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina arrived to help crews with their electrical system repair work.
The Leon County Sheriff’s Office, which includes Tallahassee, said on Facebook Friday that a woman was killed when a tree fell on her family’s home.
The storm that hit Tallahassee early Friday also destroyed two apartment building chimneys in a complex where fallen trees covered a row of cars. Fences remained crooked at Florida State University’s baseball stadium, where classes were canceled Friday.
DeSantis said on social media Friday that the state Division of Emergency Management was working with local officials to “do everything possible to return life to normal for our residents as quickly as possible.”
Gov. Bill Lee inspects a storm-damaged home along Blackburn Lane, Thursday, May 9, 2024, in Columbia, Tenn. (AP Photo/George Walker IV)
The woman killed in Florida is at least the fifth death caused by severe weather in the United States this week. A powerful tornado that ravaged a small Oklahoma town on Monday left one person dead, and Wednesday’s storms were blamed for killing two people in Tennessee and one person in North Carolina.
According to the tracking site, about 201,000 homes and businesses from Mississippi to North Carolina lost power Friday afternoon. poweroutage.us. Most of those outages occurred in Florida, where lighting and air conditioning were down for nearly 142,000 customers.
In Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, authorities on Friday asked residents to conserve and boil water as a precaution after a power outage at one of its main water treatment plants. JXN Water, the local water utility, said customers can expect a reduction in water pressure as workers assess damage from overnight storms.
“It will take several hours for the system to recover and some locations may take longer,” Ted Henifin, the water system manager, said in a statement.
Other parts of the South were cleaning up damage from the storm earlier in the week. In the rural farming community of Vidalia, Ga., and surrounding Toombs County, authorities said a tornado left a path of destruction about 2 miles long Thursday afternoon.
About 10 homes had trees crash on or through their roofs and crews worked through the night to remove about 50 downed trees that were blocking roadways, said Lynn Moore, Toombs County emergency management director. . About a dozen car accidents were reported as the storm passed, Moore said, but no one in the county was injured.
“We’re lucky it’s not louder than it was,” Moore said.
Also Thursday, the weather service reported a hurricane-force wind gust of 76 mph (122 km/h) in Autauga County, Alabama. And one person was injured in Rankin County, Mississippi, after a falling tree crashed on a house, according to weather service reports.
As of Monday, 39 states are at risk of severe weather. As of Wednesday and Thursday, about 220 million people were at risk of severe weather, said Matthew Elliott, a forecaster with the Storm Prediction Center.
Time follows a stormy month of April during which the United States had 300 confirmed tornadoes, the second record ever recorded for the month and the most since 2011. The Plains and Midwest were hammered by tornadoes this spring.
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