Not built for rain:

Tropical Storm Idalia Flooding Threatens Atlantic Coast

A Category 3 hurricane at landfall, Idalia inundated small towns along Florida’s Big Bend before roaring into Georgia, bringing the threat of high water from an unusual direction to Savannah and Charleston, S.C.

New York Times Live Coverage

Updated 

Aug. 30, 2023, 8:10 p.m. ET8 minutes ago

8 minutes ago

Patricia Mazzei and Judson Jones

Patricia Mazzei reported from Cedar Key, Fla. Judson Jones is a meteorologist for The Times.

Here’s the latest on the storm.

Idalia was thumping South Carolina on Wednesday evening, threatening Charleston and other coastal communities with rising waters from a double wallop of storm surge and high tides.

The storm had rumbled across Georgia after roaring ashore as a Category 3 hurricane in Florida’s Big Bend region, where it inundated coastal villages with rain and storm surge and left some neighborhoods unrecognizable to residents.

It has since been downgraded to a tropical storm, but forecasters warned that it could still produce strong winds and amplify what were already expected to be higher-than-usual high tides, because the full moon is making its closest orbital pass to Earth, a rare phenomenon known as a “supermoon.”

On Florida’s low-lying Big Bend coast, where the storm made landfall just after sunrise, some residents who evacuated were returning to find their picturesque beach communities littered with debris from damaged homes and splintered trees. Those who had chosen to ride it out described a harrowing night of water surging into their homes.

Here’s what to know:

• Idalia made landfall at 7:45 a.m. in Taylor County, about 90 miles southeast of the Florida capital of Tallahassee, before moving inland over parts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Officials in those states issued emergency declarations warning of heavy rain and flooding.

• Two deaths from car crashes early Wednesday in Florida were attributed to the weather conditions, one in Gainesville and one in Pasco County, north of Tampa.

• Nearly half a million customers in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina were without power by Wednesday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages across the United States.

• More than 900 flights at airports in Florida and Georgia were delayed or canceled on Wednesday, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service.