The storm, which made landfall in a sparsely populated area, wrecked homes and businesses but was not as fierce as Hurricane Ian last year, which was responsible for 150 deaths.
Hurricane Idalia, the first major storm to pummel Florida this season, brought a surge of seawater on Wednesday that flooded neighborhoods along much of the state’s western coast and lacerating winds that cut power and leveled trees. Two people died in traffic accidents that the police linked to the harsh conditions. Rescuers pulled scores of people from homes that were taking on water.
But the damage inflicted by Idalia, which was a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall on Wednesday morning, could have been far worse. By a stroke of meteorological good fortune, the hurricane came ashore in a marshy and thinly populated part of Florida, southeast of Tallahassee.
Hardest hit were sparse fishing and beach towns scattered along the Big Bend, the crook in the state that connects the Panhandle to the Florida peninsula.
“It came through — the whole ocean,” said Donna Knight, a clammer in Cedar Key, Fla., a conglomeration of tiny islands connected by bridges that juts three miles into the Gulf of Mexico.
Ms. Knight described a night of howling winds, frightening bangs and flying debris. A Category 3 hurricane has winds between 111 and 129 miles per hour.
“We should have gotten off the island,” she said early Wednesday afternoon.
By the evening, Idalia had been downgraded to a tropical storm and was charging across Georgia and the Carolinas, with the communities of Savannah and Charleston, S.C., both facing the threat of high water overnight.
Along the Florida coast, every last foot of elevation seemed crucial for avoiding the worst effects of the storm.
Not long after the storm had passed, Doug Nicholson, a resident of Crystal River, a coastal city south of Cedar Key, watched floodwaters rise along his street. His home is 13 feet above sea level, he noted. But his neighbors were on lower ground and bracing for the water to rush “right through their entire house,” he said.
Idalia generated distressingly familiar scenes of residential streets turned to rivers and wind-battered homes. But the damage was much smaller than that of Hurricane Ian last year, which made landfall in populous Southwest Florida and was responsible for 150 deaths — many of them from drowning during an enormous storm surge — and over $112 billion in damage.
