“Florida Hurricane”: Hurricane Idalia makes landfall, and hundreds of thousands of people are without power in Florida

“Hurricane Idalia” made landfall on Florida’s western coast as a powerful Category 3 storm.

It’s the strongest storm to make landfall in the Big Bend region in more than 125 years.

Idalia is the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida in the last 12 months, following Hurricane Ian in September 2022 and Hurricane Nicole in October 2022.

Florida Governor warns Floridians not to heed evacuation warnings:-

He said “This is crunch time right now. We are going to be hit with a major hurricane”, following by saying “You really got to go now”.

Idalia’s landfall strength and storm surge could reach once-in-a-lifetime levels along Florida’s Big Bend region, which could be swamped by a 12-16 foot surge, according to the National Hurricane Center.

More than 116,000 Floridians lost power before Hurricane Idalia made landfall:-

About 116,000 Florida customers are in the dark as Hurricane Adalia approaches the state, according to “poweroutage.us“.

As of 7:25 a.m. ET, the bulk of the outages were in the Big Bend area of the state. This includes Taylor County, which has a population of about 13,000; Dixie County, with about 10,000 outages; and Levy County, with about 8,000 outages.

In Wakulla County, located in the Florida Panhandle, about 10,000 customers have lost power – which is about 57% of all customers in the county.