Fierce winds and rain from Hurricane Hermine slammed Florida’s northern Gulf Coast on Friday and power outages left tens of thousands of households in the dark.
Florida Governor Rick Scott said the storm could lead to deaths and told residents to stay indoors until it had passed.
Hermine, a Category 1 hurricane, made landfall shortly after midnight about 5 miles (10 km) southeast of St. Marks, bringing heavy rains and packing winds of 80 mph (130 km/h). It left 70,000 households in the state capital Tallahassee and thousands more elsewhere without power.
“It is a mess…we have high water in numerous places,” Virgil Sandlin, the police chief in Cedar Key, Florida, told the Weather Channel.