The storm’s track could skirt the coast or swing ashore, with heavy rains and storm surges of up to four feet.
Bracing for drenching rain and heavy winds, Floridians are hunkering down on Sunday as Tropical StormIsaias whips the state’s east coast, driving storm surges of two to four feet and the threat of flash flooding as it goes. At 8 a.m. Eastern time, the center of the storm was about 40 miles offshore, east of West Palm Beach, Fla., and was moving northwest at about eight miles an hour, according to the National Hurricane Center. Its powerful right-hand side was continuing to lash the northwestern Bahamas. Isaias clobbered the Bahamas with hurricane conditions on Saturday after hitting parts of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It was downgraded to a tropical storm Saturday evening when its sustained winds slipped below 74 m.p.h.; they were about 65 m.p.h. at 8 a.m. Sunday. Forecasters said on Sunday that they were expecting only minimal changes in strength for the next few days. Flooding from the storm’s heavy rains led to the death of at least one person in Puerto Rico, the island’s Department of Public Safety said on Saturday in a statement. A woman who had been missing since Thursday drowned near Rincón, in the northwest portion of the island. As it advances northward, the center of the storm may skirt close to the coast of Florida without making landfall, or it may come ashore briefly on Sunday, forecasters said. Officials in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina were closely monitoring the storm, which is expected to affect the coasts of any of those states. Complicating the emergency response to the storm, reported coronavirus cases continue to rise sharply in all four of those states, and health officials have warned that their health care systems could be strained beyond capacity with the influx of new patients. The situation would worsen if the storm knocks out power across wide areas or forces evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes. Emergency management officials have been drawing up new plans to accommodate people who must flee their homes, including placing evacuees in hotel rooms instead of shelters like converted school gymnasiums. Summer in Florida, with its routine thunderstorms, sweaty nights and unforgiving mosquitoes, is not for the faint of heart. But the summer of 2020 is proving especially despairing, Patricia Mazzei, our Miami bureau chief, writes. A public health crisis. An economic calamity, with more than a million Floridians out of work and an unemployment payment system that was one of the slowest in the country. And now an early debut of hurricane season, to remind Florida that the inevitable convergence of the pandemic and the weather is likely to play out again, and perhaps much more seriously than this relatively mild storm, before this nightmare season ends.
