tropical storm idalia It has become a hurricane this Tuesday after passing through Cuba while approaching the shoreline gulf of floridawhere authorities have ordered evacuations and urged residents to prepare for a possible Category 3 “major storm” that will make landfall on Wednesday.
Idalia will thus reach the category of hurricane, with sustained winds of at least 179 kilometers per hour (111 miles per hour), according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC) based in Miami. The latest NHC track projections showed that the center of Idalia is likely to cross the Florida coast somewhere in the region of Big Bendwhere the northern fringe of the state curves into the Gulf side of the Florida Peninsula.
The hurricane was gaining strength and the uncertainty of its track as it turned north over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico it placed about 14 million Floridians under hurricane and tropical storm warnings.
Authorities said Idalia’s main threat to human life came from rising walls of seawater that would be pushed inland by strong winds, inundating low-lying coastal areas.
Storm surge warnings have been posted for hundreds of miles of coastline, from the Sarasota area north to Tampa and extending to the sport-fishing haven of Indian Pass at the western end of the Apalachicola Bay.