Hurricane Debby Hits Florida Coast

Hurricane Debby barreled into Northern Florida this morning with category one winds. The state has reported at least four deaths so far. Now a tropical storm, it's slowly moving inland. Expected to hit Georgia and the Carolinas later this week. Its gusty winds are packing a punch with hundreds of thousands of power outages reported. But authorities are most concerned about Debby's rainfall, which is expected to be historic. (00:26) William Brangham has our report.

Debby lashed Florida's Big Bend today with fierce winds, powerful storm surges and torrential downpours. The rain triggered catastrophic flooding, submerging whole neighborhoods and stranding drivers.

Well, good morning. I'm here [inaudible 00:00:47]-

Governor Ron DeSantis was out early today with a warning.

Most important thing to do is to just protect yourself and protect your family. Don't go out into this storm. Don't drive on the roads, particularly when they're flooded.

Shortly after, authorities pulled a semi-truck out of the water in Tampa after it fell over a guardrail, killing the driver. Yesterday in fierce winds, the US Coast Guard had to pull two people out of the Gulf of Mexico after their sailboat was damaged. On land, wind whipped Florida's Western Peninsula as Debby slowly crept along offshore.

It was actually pushing me. Literally, I was outside in a storm that was actually pushing.

Tampa's usually packed Bayshore Boulevard was a ghost town, as waves crashed onto the sidewalk. County sheriffs patrolled the streets of Fort Myers Beach, also inundated by rain and storm surge.

It's really treacherous out.

There were similar scenes across Florida's southwestern coast

In terms of rainfall this is becoming a worst-case scenario because Debby has made its way parallel to the Florida coast.

Jeff Berardelli is chief meteorologist for WFLA-TV in Tampa.

And that means rain falling over and over and over again over the same areas. And that means we could see two and a half feet of rain in some places, and there's no place in the country that can handle that much rain. In that period of time. There is going to be some dangerous and maybe catastrophic flooding in the Southeast.

As Debby continues to churn north, residents of Georgia and the Carolinas are preparing for those potentially historic rainfall totals.

That will be a generational storm that we've not seen. They're calling it a 500 to 1,000 year storm. And so with that, we're extremely concerned about flooding.

Berardelli says repeated disasters like this, events that are made worse by climate change are stretching the nation's ability to respond.

What concerns me is this is yet again, another billion-dollar disaster in the making, and we can only handle so many of these before become wary before we exhaust our resources. It's really hard to help the amount of people being affected by these big extreme weather events, and it's really starting to wear on us.

For the PBS News Hour, I'm William Brangham.