LIST: School closures due to possible impacts from Debby

AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) – Ahead of possible impacts from Debby, some CSRA school districts are announcing closures.

Tropical Depression 4 became Tropical Storm Debby on Saturday night. It’s expected to make landfall Monday morning as a Category 1 hurricane, then move northeast into southeastern Georgia and southern South Carolina. This will bring the potential for lots of rain across the CSRA, but especially in southern and eastern counties.

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School closures

• Jenkins County students in Millen will go to school on Monday, Aug. 5, but the school system will close on Tuesday, Aug. 6, and students will not report back until Thursday, Aug. 8. The school will be preparing a bag of meals for each student to take home Monday with breakfast and lunch for three days.

What’s ahead

Tropical Storm Debby strengthened rapidly Sunday and was expected to become a hurricane as it churned through the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida, bringing with it the threat of devastating floods to the southeast Atlantic coast later in the week.

The storm was likely to become a Category 1 hurricane before making landfall Monday in the Big Bend region of Florida, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

From there, the storm is expected to move eastward over northern Florida and then stall over the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, thrashing the region with the potential of record-setting rains totaling up to 30 inches beginning Tuesday.

“There’s some really amazing rainfall totals being forecast and amazing in a bad way,” Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said at a briefing Sunday. “That would be record-breaking rainfall associated with a tropical cyclone for both the states of Georgia and South Carolina if we got up to the 30 inch level.”

The flooding impacts, which could last through Friday, are expected to be especially severe in low-lying areas near the coast, including Savannah, Georgia; Hilton Head, South Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina.

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