Recovery efforts continue after monster storm Helene hits Florida

TALLAHASSEE - Rescue and recovery efforts were underway Friday in North Florida's Big Bend region and other areas of the state after Category 4 Hurricane Helene made landfall Thursday night in Taylor County.

State Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie implored people not involved in recovery efforts to stay off the roads as authorities conducted search-and-rescue efforts amid debris and dissipating storm surge.

"Please do not go out and visit the impacted areas," Guthrie said Friday morning at the state Emergency Operations Center. "We have over 1,500 search and rescue personnel in the highly impacted areas right now. Do not get in their way. We need you to stay off the roads and get out of our way so that we could go do our jobs."

Packing 140 mph winds, Helene swept through North Florida after surging onto land about 11:10 p.m. Thursday east of the mouth of the Aucilla River, about 10 miles from the Taylor County community of Perry. But storm surge from the massive storm also caused damage up and down the state's Gulf Coast.

Helene is no longer a tropical system, the National Hurricane Center said in its final advisory at 5 p.m. The remnants have moved up to Kentucky.

Hillsborough County Emergency Management Director Timothy Dudley said Friday many people remained in areas hit by storm surge after they did not leave as Helene moved north parallel to the coast.

"Our rescue teams are currently working hard in the field to save lives," Dudley said. "Unfortunately, many people did not heed our order to evacuate Zone A, and they have left themselves in a very dangerous situation. As forecasted, the storm surge reached 5 to 8 feet at various locations throughout Hillsborough County, and the danger is not over yet."

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue's Urban Search and Rescue team positioned squads to conduct damage assessments throughout the coastal communities in Dixie County'a Horseshoe Beach and Suwannee, Florida. They are part of 84-member Florida Task Force One.

Authorities said eight deaths had been attributed to the storm Friday. They included fallen tree killed a person in a home in the Big Bend's Dixie County and a fallen sign hit a car being driven on Interstate 4 near Tampa's Ybor City neighborhood. There were five drownings: two in Treasure Island, two in Indian Rocks Beach and one in Dunedin. A woman in her late 70s was found dead as water got into the home in Tampa.

The Florida National Guard has activated approximately 3,900 Guardsmen.

The storm had left more than nearly 60,000 utility customers without electric, according to Poweroutages.us .

Power outages remained close to 100 percent in Suwanee, Taylor, Hamilton, Madison, Dixie and Columbia counties, which were directly in Helene's path. The storm also left people in the dark in numerous other areas of the state.

Duke Energy Florida reported power was restored to more than 407,000 customers while nearly 285,000 continue to experience outages. The utility has 2 million customers.

Approximately 8,000 workers have responded to the outages.

"Several areas of the state were severely devastated by this storm, so it's safe to say power restoration is going to be a multi-day event," Todd Fountain, Duke Energy Florida storm director. "Even as flooding recedes, the debris left behind is also proving to be a significant challenge. We appreciate our customers' patience and thank our emergency management officials and first responders for all their hard work."

Florida Power & Light reported it had restored power to more than 589,000 customers with approximately 100,000 still without power.

The utility said it has a restoration workforce of more than 10,000 from 23 states.

"We have restored power to 85% of our customers impacted by Helene, but our work is not done,' " FPL President and CEO Armando Pimentel said. " We are committed to getting the lights back on. Our crews will work around the clock because our job is not done until every customer has power."

Triple trauma

Helene was the third hurricane to make landfall in rural Taylor County in a little more than a year, after Hurricane Idalia in August 2023 and Hurricane Debby last month.

During a Friday morning news conference, Gov. Ron DeSantis worried that there might be a "sense of trauma" for communities that also have had to rebuild after the two earlier storms.

"To have something that was even bigger than those two storms causing a lot of damage, I think it's a sense of trauma for the community," DeSantis said. "It's demoralizing because, it's like, we worked on this, and now we could be potentially worse off than we were before."

But DeSantis added the state will assist people in what were already designated as "fiscally constrained" rural communities.

"We're going to have support there," DeSantis said. "It's not easy, but we'll get through it."

DeSantis then appeared in St. Petersburg, Perry and Cedar Key.

Interstate 10 and Interstate 75 were open Friday morning. Bridge inspections were underway along the Gulf Coast, where storm surge closed a number of closings.

Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue said "cut and toss" efforts continued to clear debris from roads.

"There is a lot of vegetative debris. There's a lot of debris in the roads," Perdue said. "Trees can be wrapped in power lines. Please do not get out there and start trying to do things on your own."

Tampa International Airport reopened Friday morning. Also, airports in Tallahassee, Gainesville, Lakeland and St. Petersburg-Clearwater were open.

Perdue said Port Tampa, which was among the state's seaports that experienced monster storm surge, plans to "open as quickly as possible."

"They have to inspect the channel, but their fuel operation will be back up and running within the next few hours," Perdue said.