Hurricane Helene storms Florida's Big Bend

What happened

Hurricane Helene roared across Florida's Panhandle Thursday night, making landfall near the Big Bend town of Perry at 11:10 p.m. as a Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 140 mph. At roughly 420 miles wide, Helene is "one of the biggest storms on record to strike the Gulf Coast," The Washington Post said, and the most powerful ever to hit the Big Bend area. The National Hurricane Center said Helene remained "extremely dangerous and life-threatening" as it moved into Georgia as a Category 2 storm Friday morning. It was downgraded to a tropical storm at 5 a.m. local time.

Who said what

Helene made landfall in Florida's "sparsely-populated Big Bend area, home to fishing villages and vacation hideaways," The Associated Press said, but damage from the storm stretched along Florida's west coast and into neighboring states. President Joe Biden approved preemptive disaster declarations for not just Florida but also Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina.

The death of a driver on I-4 near Tampa, when a sign blew onto their car, "just shows you that it's very dangerous conditions out there," Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday evening. "You need to be, right now, just hunkering down." Storm-related deaths were also reported in Georgia and North Carolina. More than a million people lost power in Florida along with tens of thousands in Georgia and the Carolinas. Storm surge — the rise in water above normally dry land — approached 10 feet near where Helene made landfall and was 6 to 8 feet in the Tampa Bay area, topping records set last year during Hurricane Idalia.

What next?

Floridians will wake up "to a state where very likely there's been additional loss of life and certainly there's going to be loss of property," DeSantis said. Helene was forecast to peter out over the Tennessee Valley Friday and Saturday. Metro Atlanta was among the areas under a flash-flood warning, said National Weather Service meteorologist Peter Mullinax to The Wall Street Journal , and "we're anticipating numerous significant landslides in parts of the southern Appalachians."