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Another big storm’s brewing and it has its sights set on Georgia.
Tropical Storm Helene became a named storm Tuesday, a little more than a year after Hurricane Idalia brought wide-ranging destruction to north Florida and south Georgia.
The National Weather Service predicts Helene, located just east of Cancun, Mexico early Wednesday morning, will strengthen and hit the Florida panhandle near Tallahassee sometime Thursday night as a Category 3 hurricane with winds over 110 mph.
Current models show the storm moving through Georgia on Friday, bringing 4 to 8 inches of rain to much of the state. North Georgia may get even more.
Helene is the eighth named storm in what has been a slower than expected hurricane season, which runs from June through November. There were 20 named storms in 2023, with Idalia being the only one to make landfall in the United States.
Since 1851, nine major hurricanes, those with sustained wind speeds greater than 110 mph, have made landfall directly along Georgia’s coast or the short distance across Florida’s Big Bend region. Two — Idalia and Michael — have been in the past six years.
Mother Nature had it out for the Peach State in the latter half of the 19th century: major storms struck in 1851, 1854, 1877, 1893, 1894, 1896 and 1898.
Then, for more than 100 years, Georgia was spared.
The quiet ended in October 2018 with Hurricane Michael, a true monster of a storm. It struck the Florida panhandle as the first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall in the contiguous United States since Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Michael was also the first Category 5 hurricane on record to hit the Florida panhandle and, with sustained winds of 160 mph, is the fourth-strongest hurricane in terms of wind speed to hit the mainland United States.
Michael entered Georgia near Donaldsonville as a Category 2 hurricane, causing significant damage. The AJC reported Michael left 400,000 Georgia homes without power and at least 127 roads blocked. An 11-year-old girl in Seminole County was killed.
Michael, initially labelled a Category 4 storm, was so destructive the World Meteorological Organization retired the name. The name Michael was replaced with Milton, which may be first used in 2024.
Let’s hope we won’t need it.
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