Hurricane Helene: Man and his dog rescued 25 miles out to sea as storm hits

A man and his dog have been rescued from the ocean off the southeast coast of the US after a sailboat began to sink as Hurricane Helene approached Florida .

They had been sailing on a 36-foot boat on Thursday when it became disabled and began taking on water around 25 miles out to sea, said US Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater on Friday morning.

An image shared by the station showed the man and his dog - both wearing life jackets - bobbing in the choppy sea as a Coast Guard helicopter that had been scrambled to save them hovered overhead.

At least three storm-related deaths have been recorded in the US as millions of Americans braced for Hurricane Helene to bring dangerous winds and rain across much of the southeastern states.

Helene made landfall late on Thursday night in northwestern Florida as a Category 4 storm, which forecasters warned could create a “nightmare” storm surge.

By around 10am (UK time) on Friday, it had weakened to a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 75mph, according to the US National Hurricane Centre.

The hurricane was moving rapidly inland, with the centre of the storm set to race from southern to northern Georgia on Friday morning.

The hurricane centre said Helene roared ashore at around 11.10pm local time on Thursday near the mouth of the Aucilla River in the Big Bend area of Florida's Gulf Coast.

It had maximum sustained winds estimated at 140mph.

That location was only about 20 miles north west of where Hurricane Idalia came ashore last year at nearly the same ferocity and caused widespread damage.

Helene prompted hurricane and flash flood warnings extending far beyond the coast up into northern Georgia and western North Carolina.

More than 1.2 million homes and businesses were without power in Florida, more than 190,000 in Georgia and more than 30,000 in the Carolinas, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.

The governors of those states and Alabama and Virginia all declared emergencies.

One person was killed in Florida when a sign fell on their car and two people were reported killed in a possible tornado in south Georgia as the storm approached.

"When Floridians wake up tomorrow morning, we're going to be waking up to a state where very likely there's been additional loss of life and certainly there's going to be loss of property," Florida governor Ron DeSantis said at a news conference on Thursday night.

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