Debby to become hurricane as it heads to Florida's Gulf Coast

By Rich McKay

(Reuters) -Tropical Storm Debby is expected to strengthen rapidly into a hurricane before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida's Gulf Coast, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Sunday, warning of life-threatening ocean surges.

The hurricane center forecast life-threatening conditions, including storm surges up to 7 feet (2 meters). As it slowly moves north through the week, the storm may bring "potentially historic rainfall" of between 10 and 20 inches (25-50 cm) and catastrophic flooding to Georgia and South Carolina, it said.

Preparing for Debby, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called up 3,000 National Guard troops and placed most of Florida's cities and counties under emergency orders, while evacuations were ordered in parts of the Gulf Coast counties of Pasco, Hernando and Citrus.

Debby became a tropical storm late on Saturday. As of 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT) Debby was about 130 miles (210 km) southwest of Tampa and moving toward the Gulf Coast at 13 mph (20 kph), with maximum sustained winds of 65 mph (100 kph), the NHC said.

The center of Tropical Storm Debby will move across the eastern Gulf of Mexico through Sunday and reach the Florida Big Bend coast Monday morning, it added. Debby is then expected to move slowly across northern Florida and southern Georgia Monday and Tuesday, it said.

The storm left Cuba's northern coast on Saturday evening, when it was about 100 miles (160 km) west-southwest of Key West in Florida, the NHC said.

Debby is expected to lose some strength after landfall but bring heavy rain as it crosses central Florida out to the Atlantic coast, before crawling up to Savannah, Georgia, and then onward to Charleston, South Carolina, early in the week.

Ocean surges forecast for Bonita Beach northward to Tampa Bay could send sea waves further inland than normal, damaging structures and endangering anyone in their path.

A tropical storm warning is in effect for extreme southern Florida, stretching as far north as the Fort Myers area crushed by Hurricane Ian in 2022.

Forecasters expect a large number of Atlantic hurricanes in the 2024 season, which began on June 1, with four to seven seen as major. That exceeds the 2005 record-breaking season that spawned hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Debby is expected to take a similar track as Hurricane Ian, which killed 103 people in Florida and caused damage running into billions of dollars in as it barreled along the Gulf Coast.

Only one hurricane, Beryl, has yet formed in the Atlantic this year. The earliest Category 5 storm on record, it struck the Caribbean and Mexico's Yucatan peninsula before rolling up the Gulf Coast of Texas as a Category 1 storm, with sustained winds up to 95 mph (153 kph).

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Additional reporting by Chandni Shah, Jonathan Allen and Surbhi Misra; Editing by William Mallard, Jane Merriman and Will Dunham)