Tropical Storm — Eastern Putnum, Florida

2024-09-26 to 2024-09-27 · Eastern Putnum, Florida

Event narrative

Over 15,000 customers were without power during the peak outage and 14,000 (about 34% of the county) were without power after the storm passed early Friday Morning, the 27th. There is damage to a city dock south of the Memorial Bridge in Palatka. Dozens of homes were flooded along the St. Johns River basin, including those along Sportsman Harbor. There were over 190 calls for trees and power lines down across the county. The Welaka lift stations went down Thursday evening through Friday afternoon. Multiple traffic lights and signs were damaged.

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 1217508. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.