Tropical Storm — Coastal Nassau, Florida

2024-09-26 to 2024-09-27 · Coastal Nassau, Florida

Event narrative

Numerous trees and power lines were down across the county. Multiple trees fell on homes and cars causing extensive damage in Florence Point, Oyster Bay, Fernandina Beach and Yulee. A couple of boats ran aground in Bells River due to breaking from their anchors. At 11:15 pm on 9/26, the AWOS at Fernandina Beach measured sustained winds of 40mph with gust of 44 mph before an outage through the night. A Weatherstem site in Yulee measured a gust to 61 mph out of the SSE at 1:20am on 9/27. The same site observed sustained wind to 40 mph at 11:20pm on 9/26. Over 31,000 customers (about 58% of the county) were without power after the storm passed early Friday Morning, the 27th.

Wider weather episode

Hurricane Helene made landfall as a category 4 with peak winds of near 140 mph in the Florida Big

Bend just east of the Aucilla River Entrance in Taylor County, late Thursday evening September 26,

2024. Helene's main impact to southeast Georgia and northeast Florida was wind damage as it

tracked quickly north-northeast. The very powerful hurricane and the forward motion produced a

wide swath of wind damage across the forecast area with peak wind gusts 55 to 75 mph across the

eastern half of the area, and western zones up to 75 to 100 mph from the Suwannee Valley area

northward through interior southeast GA. The max wind gust of 100 mph was measured at the Alma

GA ASOS in the early morning hours of Friday September 27th. Given the strength of these winds,

widespread power outages, structure damage and downed or uprooted trees occurred across inland

southeast GA and portions of northeast FL. At least 1 tornado occurred, which was in Coffee county.

Maximum rainfall amounts of 3 to 5 inches were located over western half of the area.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 1217502. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.