Hurricane Idalia is intensifying and is expected to grow into a powerful hurricane, possibly reaching Category 3, with winds over 111 mph, before making landfall on the Florida Coast on Wednesday, August 30, 2023 morning.
It’s on track to hit Florida’s Big Bend region at a location no major hurricane- meaning Category 3 or higher- has ever historically landed.
‘Hurricane Idalia will likely be an unprecedented event for many locations in the Florida Big Bend’, says the Tallahassee National Weather Service, ‘and looking back through recorded history, no major hurricanes have ever moved through the Apalachee Bay. When you try to compare this storm to others, don’t. No one has seen this’.
Forecasters emphasized that there are no major hurricanes in the historical dataset going back to 1851 that have tracked into Apalachee Bay. one.
This region is quite vulnerable to storm surge, with the gulf water pushed onto shore, at times violently, by a tropical storm’s strong winds.
The Florida Forgotten Coast and Big Bend are some of the most surge-prone areas in the world. The terrain is essentially flat inland a long way from the coast, according to Clark Evans, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
The surge will be serious, with the National Hurricane Center projecting 10 to 15 feet of surge in the area from Aucilla River to Yankeetown, Florida.
