TALLAHASSEE, Florida — A storm system moving across Cuba on Friday is likely to bring torrential rains to the Florida peninsula this weekend. The forecast is especially concerning for low-lying coastal and urban areas that inundated by dangerous floods this year.
According to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, there is a 90 percent chance that the storm will intensify into a tropical storm by Saturday night as it heads north, near the coast of southwest Florida. The water there is extremely warm, with temperatures reaching nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit this week.
The hurricane center has provisionally designated it as Potential Tropical Cyclone Four. The next name on this season’s list is Debby. “Regardless of development, heavy rainfall could lead to flash flooding in Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas over the weekend,” the advisory said.
Floods are not dangerous, they don’t need a name. Torrential rains due to tropical disturbance in June left many roads in Florida impassable, flooding school buses and stranding residents as cars drifted through flooded streets.
“Hurricanes aren’t the only problem, right?” said Tom Frazer, director of the Florida Flood Hub for Applied Research and Innovation at the University of South Florida.
“We can have very rapidly developing storm systems that take advantage of extremely warm ocean water and high water content in the atmosphere to deposit large amounts of rain on different parts of the peninsula,” Frazer said.
Forecast models suggest the storm could make landfall as a tropical storm on Sunday and move across Florida’s Big Bend region into the Atlantic Ocean, where it will likely continue to threaten Georgia and the Carolinas early next week.
At a county park in Plant City east of Tampa, there was a steady stream of people shoveling sand into bags Friday morning. Terry Smith, 67, filled 10 bags with a neighbor from StrawBerry Ridge Village, a 55-plus community of manufactured homes in suburban Hillsborough County.
Smith says he’s not too worried about the storm, even though he doesn’t have home insurance.
“Life is a risk,” Smith said. “We’re probably going to try to stay in Saturday and Sunday and ride it out.”
In Fort Lauderdale, the June flooding was so bad that the city is keeping open until further notice sites where residents can fill up to five sandbags per day.
“The most significant impact from this storm will be rainfall. Significant amounts are forecast over the next five days, with the bulk falling Saturday-Monday in Florida,” University of Miami meteorologist Brian McNoldy noted in X.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has declared a state of emergency for most Florida counties, from the Florida Keys through Central Florida and the Tampa Bay region to the western Panhandle.
DeSantis spoke about sea level rise and the threat it poses to Florida during his first term as governor, but that message faded after he was re-elected and ran for president. Despite record heat and increasingly costly hurricanes, DeSantis recently signed legislation removing most references to climate change into state law and invalidates the goals of transitioning the state to cleaner energy.
Meanwhile, far off the west coast of Mexico, Hurricane Carlotta formed over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, packing sustained winds of up to 80 mph (130 kph). The hurricane center said Carlotta was moving west-northwestward, about 455 miles (730 kilometers) southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula, and that no advisories or warnings were in effect.
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Associated Press photographer Chris O’Meara in Tampa contributed to this report. Kate Payne is a staff member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-reported issues.