"Extremely Dangerous" Hurricane Idalia Makes Landfall On US' Florida Coast
NDTV
More than 140,000 customers in Florida were without electricity as of 8:00 am, according to tracking website PowerOutage.us.
Hurricane Idalia slammed into northwest Florida as an "extremely dangerous" Category 3 storm early Wednesday, as officials warned of catastrophic impacts including storm surges of up to 16 feet (about five meters).
Authorities in the southern US state described Idalia and its potentially deadly high surging waters as a once-in-a-lifetime event for Florida's northwest coast, ordering mass evacuations and issuing flood alerts.
The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Idalia, which earlier raked western Cuba, was packing maximum sustained winds of approximately 125 miles (215 kilometers) per hour as it made landfall around 7:45 am (1145 GMT) in Florida's marshy Big Bend area.
