TALLAHASSEE, Fla. − Hurricane Debby, now a tropical storm, roared ashore Monday along the Big Bend coast of Florida, killing at least four people, flooding streets and causing widespread power outages as the storm continued toward Georgia and South Carolina, where it’s expected to bring catastrophic flooding this week.
Debby, the fourth named storm of what is expected to be a historic hurricane season, made landfall Monday at 7 a.m. near the coastal town of Steinhatchee as a Category 1 storm with maximum sustained winds of 80 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. Steinhatchee, about 70 miles west of Gainesville and home to some 500 people, is just 10 miles from where Hurricane Idalia came ashore last year.
After more than three hours moving across northern Florida, Debby was downgraded to a tropical storm with sustained winds of 70 mph, the hurricane center said in its 11 a.m. ET update. By 2 p.m., the winds were down to 65 mph, though the storm was still dropping copious amounts of rain.
State officials reported widespread flooding and inundating storm surge as Debby moved inland. The storm’s winds uprooted trees and toppled utility poles, knocking out power to more than 250,000 homes and businesses throughout northern Florida. Forecasters said Debby’s powerful winds could also spawn tornadoes, and storm surge could reach 10 feet in some areas.
“This is a life-threatening situation,” the hurricane center warned.
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Debby is projected to move slowly across northern Florida before unleashing “potentially historic heavy rainfall” across the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.
Widespread rainfall totals of 10-20 inches are expected from northern Florida to southeastern North Carolina, while parts of northern Georgia and South Carolina, including Charleston, could get upward of 30 inches of rain through this weekend, Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a YouTube livestream.
President Joe Biden on Sunday declared an emergency across Florida, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster relief efforts. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the Florida National Guard and Florida State Guard were activated to support humanitarian assistance and search-and-rescue missions. 
Developments:
∎ The National Hurricane Center recorded a 98 mph wind gust near Horseshoe Beach, according to the Florida Severe Weather Network, a collection of state-run weather stations.
∎ The National Water Prediction Service projected major flooding in three locations on the Santa Fe River and a location on the Suwannee River in north Florida.
∎ Debby wreaked havoc on travel. Nearly 1,200 flights had been canceled and close to 850 were delayed Monday, according to flight tracking site FlightAware. The Federal Aviation Administration said all flights at Orlando International Airport have been grounded while airports in Tallahassee and Gainesville were closed.
At least four storm-related deaths have been reported in Florida.
The driver of a semi-truck was killed overnight near Temple Terrace after losing control of his vehicle on a wet Interstate 75 northeast of Tampa, the National Weather Service reported.
The three previously reported deaths linked to the storm included a woman and a 12-year-old boy killed in a car crash and a teenage boy killed when a tree fell on a mobile home.
The truck driver, a 64-year-old man from New Albany, Mississippi, lost control of the truck at around 2:30 a.m., Sgt. Steve Gaskins, a public affairs officer with the Florida Highway Patrol, said in a news release. The truck rotated on the wet highway, collided with a concrete barrier and went over the wall, coming to rest hanging over a bridge. Gaskins said the cab came loose from the trailer and fell into a deep canal below.
Divers from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office responded shortly afterward and found the deceased driver still inside the cab underwater in the canal, according to an X post by the Sheriff’s office.
A 13-year-old boy was killed as Hurricane Debby made landfall along the Florida coast Monday morning, the Levy County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Deputies responded to a report of a tree that had fallen onto a mobile home around 8 a.m. in Fanning Springs, about 35 miles east from where the hurricane came ashore. The boy who died was “crushed inside the home,” the sheriff’s office said. 
“Our thoughts and prayers are with this family as they deal with this tragedy,” the sheriff’s office said, urging people to be careful as they begin to assess the storm damage. “Downed power lines and falling trees are among the many hazards. One life is too many. Please be safe.”
– Jonathan Limehouse, USA TODAY
After making landfall, Debby crawled north across northern Florida, drenching the the state’s interior as the coast experienced several feet of storm surge.
As of 2 p.m. ET, Debby was 10 miles northwest of Live Oak, about midway between Tallahassee and Jacksonville, moving north-northeast at 7 mph, according to the hurricane center.
Debby is expected to decrease in forward speed as it turns toward the northeast and east and moves across northern Florida and southern Georgia on Monday and through Tuesday, before approaching the Georgia coast Tuesday night.
Donna Luce lost power at 6 a.m. Monday and said rain came down for hours as the storm approached and eventually made landfall. Her home’s rain gauge showed 7 inches of rain fell Sunday alone, she said.
“It is still raining pretty hard and we expect to get that most of the day, kind of like it’s sitting right here on top of us,” Luce told USA TODAY on Monday morning.
Many fellow residents in Mayo, a small town about 30 miles north of where Debby came ashore, have spent the past year recovering from Hurricane Idalia, said Luce, 65.
“Most people had just gotten their roofs repaired, and had gotten back up on their feet,” she said, adding that several of her neighbors still had tarps on their roofs this summer. “Now it’s hitting us again one year later and we are a little discouraged.”
– Claire Thornton, USA TODAY
The widespread flooding and significant storm surge Debby has caused across northern Florida are expected to last several days, DeSantis said Monday.
Kevin Guthrie, the executive director for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said some parts of southwest Florida received up to a foot of rain as Debby approached the Big Bend region. He added that flooding in northern Florida will be widespread as up to 20 inches could fall over the next few days.
Guthrie cautioned people to stay indoors as flash floods break out inland and storm surge continues to inundate coastal communities.
The flood threat from Hurricane Debby, Guthrie said, “is probably going to be here for the next five to seven days, maybe as long as 10 days depending on how much rainfall we get.”
Alice Brown and her husband were awoken by what sounded like a freight train early Monday morning. They soon realized it was the wind and rain lashing their home as Hurricane Debby approached the Big Bend region and eventually made landfall.
“This was the strongest wind and most rain I’ve ever seen,” Brown told USA TODAY.
Brown, 68, lives in downtown High Springs, a small city of some 6,000 people outside Gainesville. While she did not lose power, several of her friends had their power knocked out overnight and were still without it Monday afternoon. 
Jordan Huey, one of Brown’s neighbors, woke up to a tree falling within inches of his son’s bedroom. Another tree in his yard uprooted and destroyed at least 20 feet of his fence. Huey still had not been able to assess the damage because powerful wind gusts were still hurling tree limbs and other debris outside.
“This is the worst it’s ever been in our area,” said Huey, 52.
Debby is leaving behind some eye-popping rain totals, including the 16.56 inches over two days reported by a weather station at Lakewood Ranch in Manatee County. There have been several reports of more than 10 inches of rain across the county, including 12.43 inches at the Sarasota Bradenton airport.
The weather service in Jacksonville issued a flash flood warning for parts of four counties in north Florida, saying between 7 and 14 inches of rain have fallen, and another 3 to 6 inches are possible.
With Debby’s center still over north Florida by early afternoon, a daily rainfall record was set at Charleston International Airport in South Carolina, with 2.29 inches to that point, according to meteorologist Steven Taylor with the National Weather Service in Charleston.
Taylor also reiterated the forecast of 10-20 inches of rain with localized amounts near 30 inches is still on track. “The situation still looks favorable for a historic rainfall event with areas of catastrophic flooding. This is a potentially significant and life-threatening event,” he said.
A woman and a boy died in a single-vehicle crash in Dixie County on Sunday night, the eve of Hurricane Debby’s landfall, according to a law enforcement report.
Florida Highway Patrol troopers arrived at the scene of the crash around 9:30 p.m. A 38-year-old woman and 12-year-old boy were pronounced dead, while a 14-year-old boy was seriously injured and rushed to a hospital for treatment.
Witnesses told the Florida Highway Patrol the car lost control “due to inclement weather and wet roadway.”
“After losing control, the vehicle struck the guardrail in the center median, then redirected, overturning, leaving the roadway to the right,” the Florida Highway Patrol said. The crash is under investigation.
More than 250,000 homes and businesses in Florida, the majority of them in the north, were without power by 3 p.m. ET as Debby continued its path across the state.
The outages were most abundant from Wakulla to Levy County, according to Poweroutage.us. In Taylor County, where Hurricane Debby made landfall at 7 a.m., more than 97% of utility customers lost power at one point. In several surrounding counties, that figure was well over 80%.
At a news conference Monday morning, DeSantis said there were 17,000 linemen across the state poised to begin restoring power once the storm passes.
Debby wasn’t the only storm forecasters were watching Monday. They were also keeping an eye on another developing tropical system that’s approaching the Caribbean Sea.
Although chances for development were low as of Monday afternoon, the National Hurricane Center said “environmental conditions are expected to become more conducive for development later this week as the system moves across the western Caribbean Sea or the southern Gulf of Mexico.”
If its winds eventually reach 39 mph, the system would become a named tropical storm. The next name on the list is Ernesto. It’s too early to determine if there will be any impact to the U.S. from this system.
The eastern Pacific hurricane season has also heated up: The Pacific currently has four named storms spinning at the same time: Carlotta, Daniel, Emilia and Fabio. This is the first time since August 1974 that the eastern North Pacific has had four named storms simultaneously, according to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach.
None of the four storms are forecast to approach or impact land as they spin far out to sea in the Pacific, the National Hurricane Center said.  
The activity in the Pacific comes after a very slow start to the season. For the first time since the satellite era began in 1966, the entire North Pacific saw no named storm activity between June 1 and July 3, Klotzbach said.
Hurricane Debby made landfall within miles of where Hurricane Idalia came ashore last year.
Idalia, a Category 3 storm, made landfall on Aug. 30 near Keaton Beach in Taylor County along Florida’s Big Bend Coast. The storm flattened homes and left coastal towns under several feet of water. Dekle Beach in Taylor County and Horseshoe Beach in Dixie County, in particular, experienced a devastating storm surge, with water 7 to 12 feet above normally dry ground.
Now, less than a year later, Hurricane Debby came ashore near Steinhatchee, about 10 miles southeast of Keaton Beach. While it’s a less powerful storm, Debby was capable of unleashing life-threatening storm surge across much of the same region that was walloped by Idalia.
Repairs on Spyridon Aibejeris’ Keaton Beach house were only just completed. 
“Like, two weeks ago,” he said, before a powerful gust of wind and rain interrupted his interview with a USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida reporter. 
He and his family rode out Hurricane Idalia, a Category 3 storm that made landfall along the Big Bend coast last August, in the same Perry hotel he stood in front of early Monday morning, waiting for yet another hurricane to bear down on Florida – and his house. 
“Man, I’ve done this so many times. You just go back and see what you’ve got to do,” said Aibejeris, who owns a campground near his house that was also damaged by Idalia.
“I hope I don’t have to go back to that again,” he added. 
Debby is a large and slow-moving storm, making the system particularly dangerous as record amounts of rain inundate many areas, especially along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina in the coming days.
The storm’s center was forecast to move near Savannah on Tuesday night and drag along the South Carolina Coast on Thursday night. “Multiple days of very, very heavy rainfall” are possible, National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan said.
The National Weather Service estimates rainfall totals could reach up to 30 inches or more in isolated locations along the coast through Friday. The weather service office in Charleston, South Carolina, warned of “potentially historic rainfall.”
A few tornadoes are possible through Monday morning, mainly over western and northern Florida and southern Georgia, the hurricane center said.
Swells generated by Debby are expected to affect much of the Gulf Coast of Florida through Monday, reach the Southeast U.S. coast on Monday and continue through the middle of the week.
“These conditions are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions,” said Richard Pasch, a senior hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center.
As Debby strengthens in the Gulf and draws closer to Florida, hurricane experts and scientists say it’s a classic example of how the wind scale categories used to describe hurricanes can fall short of telling the whole story.
“This is another example of a storm where the primary impacts are going to be from water, rather than wind,” said James Franklin, a retired branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the National Hurricane Center.
Jennifer Collins, a professor in the Geosciences School at the University of South Florida, has studied how to better communicate all of a storm’s threats. Looking at the forecasts for up to 30 inches of rain in isolated locations between Savannah and Charleston, Collins told USA TODAY she’s very concerned about the likelihood of “catastrophic flooding” and hopes people will look at all of the hurricane center’s forecast products. Read more here.
Illustrations include an array of forecast tools and models, and not all are created equal. The hurricane center uses only the top four or five highest performing models to help make its forecasts.
The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30. The peak of the season is Sept. 10, and the most activity usually happens between mid-August and mid-October, according to the hurricane center.
After Hurricane Beryl’s deadly rampage in July, forecasters from Colorado State University raised their already record hurricane forecast. They now expect an additional hurricane (a total of 12 for the season) and two more named storms (25 for the season).