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Hurricane Debby to bring heavy rains and catastrophic flooding to Florida, Georgia and S. Carolina

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Hurricane Debby to bring heavy rains and catastrophic flooding to Florida, Georgia and S. Carolina


TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — The center of Hurricane Debby is expected to reach the Big Bend coast of Florida early Monday bringing potential record-setting rains, catastrophic flooding and life-threatening storm surge as it moves slowly across the northern part of the state before stalling over the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina.

Debby was located about 100 miles (161 kilometers) west of Tampa, Florida, with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph (120 kph). The storm was moving north at 12 mph (19 kph), the National Hurricane Center in Miami said Sunday evening.

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Debby is the fourth named storm of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season after Tropical Storm Alberto, Hurricane Beryl and Tropical Storm Chris, all of which formed in June.

Forecasters warned heavy amounts of rain from Debby could spawn catastrophic flooding in Florida, South Carolina and Georgia.

The storm was expected to make landfall around midday Monday in the Big Bend area of Florida, about 16 miles (26 kilometers) south of Tampa, the hurricane center said. A tornado watch also was in effect for parts of Florida and Georgia until 6 a.m. Monday.

“Right now, we are to trying secure everything from floating away,” said Sheryl Horne, whose family owns the Shell Island Fish Camp along the Wakulla River in St. Marks, Florida, where some customers moved their boats inland.

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The sparsely populated Big Bend region in the Florida Panhandle also was hit last year by Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane.

“I am used to storms and I’m used to cleaning up after storms,” Horne said.

Debby was expected to move eastward over northern Florida and then stall over the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, thrashing the region with potential record-setting rains totaling up to 30 inches (76 centimeters) beginning Tuesday.

Officials also warned of life-threatening storm surge along Florida’s Gulf Coast, with 6 to 10 feet (1.8 to 3 meters) of inundation expected Monday between the Ochlockonee and Suwannee rivers.

“There’s some really amazing rainfall totals being forecast and amazing in a bad way,” Michael Brennan, director of the hurricane center, said at a briefing. “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.”

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Flooding impacts could last through Friday and are expected to be especially severe in low-lying areas near the coast, including Savannah, Georgia; Hilton Head, South Carolina; and Charleston, South Carolina. North Carolina officials were monitoring the storm’s progress.

Officials in Savannah said the area could see a month’s worth of rain in four days if the system stalls over the region.

“This is going to a significant storm. The word historic cannot be underscored here,” Savannah Mayor Van. R. Johnson said during a press conference.

Debby’s outer bands grazed the west coast of Florida, flooding streets and bringing power outages. Sarasota County officials said most roadways on Siesta Key, a barrier island off the coast of Sarasota, were under water. The hurricane center had predicted the system would strengthen as it curved off the southwest Florida coast, where the water has been extremely warm.

At a briefing Sunday afternoon, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis warned the storm could lead to “really, really significant flooding that will happen in North Central Florida.”

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The storm would follow a similar track to Hurricane Idalia but would “be much wetter. We are going to see much more inundation,” he said.

A hurricane warning was issued for parts of the Big Bend and Florida Panhandle areas, while tropical storm warnings were posted for Florida’s West Coast, the southern Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas. A tropical storm watch extended farther west into the Panhandle.

Tropical storms and hurricanes can trigger river flooding and overwhelm drainage systems and canals. Forecasters warned of 6 to 12 inches (15 centimeters to 30 centimeters) of rain and up to 18 inches (46 centimeters) in isolated areas of Florida.

Storm surge expected to hit Gulf Coast, including Tampa Bay

Flat Florida is prone to flooding even on sunny days and the storm was predicted to bring a surge of 2 to 4 feet (0.6 to 1.2 meters) along most of the Gulf Coast, including Tampa Bay, with a storm tide of up to 7 feet (2.1 meters) further north in the Big Bend region.

Forecasters warned of “a danger of life-threatening storm surge inundation” in a region that includes Hernando Beach, Crystal River, Steinhatchee and Cedar Key. Officials in Citrus and Levy counties ordered a mandatory evacuation of coastal areas, while those in Hernando, Manatee, Pasco and Taylor counties called for voluntary evacuations. Shelters opened in those and some other counties.

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Citrus County Sheriff Mike Prendergast estimated 21,000 people live in his county’s evacuation zone.

Residents, businesses prepare for flooding

Residents in Steinhatchee, Florida, which flooded during Hurricane Idalia, spent Sunday moving items to higher ground.

“I’ve been here 29 years. This isn’t the first time I’ve done it. Do you get used to it? No,” Mark Reblin said as he moved items out of the liquor store he owns.

Employees of Savannah Canoe and Kayak in Georgia said they were busy tying down their watercrafts, laying sandbags and raising equipment off the ground. Mayme Bouy, the store manager, said she wasn’t too concerned about the forecast calling for a potential historic rain event.

“But we do have some high tides this week so if the rain is happening around then, that could be bad,” Bouy added. “I’d rather play it safe than sorry.”

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Governors declare emergencies ahead of landfall

DeSantis declared a state of emergency for 61 of Florida’s 67 counties, with the National Guard activating 3,000 guard members. Utility crews from in and out of state were ready to restore power after the storm, he said in a post on X.

In Tampa alone, officials gave out more than 30,000 sandbags to barricade against flooding.

“We’ve got our stormwater drains cleared out. We’ve got our generators all checked and full. We’re doing everything that we need to be prepared to face a tropical storm,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster made their own emergency declarations.

Northeast coast also preparing for storm conditions

Emergency managers in New England and New York were monitoring the path of the storm for the possibility of remnants striking their states. Northeast states including New York and Vermont have been hit by heavy rain and thunderstorms in recent weeks and were still coping with flooding and saturated ground.

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Chandler reported from Montgomery, Alabama. Jake Offenhartz contributed from New York.





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Georgia

Election 2024 live updates: Trump hits North Carolina; Harris to stump in Georgia

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Election 2024 live updates: Trump hits North Carolina; Harris to stump in Georgia


Trump called into Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” this morning before his day of campaigning in North Carolina and again defended his violent comments about Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney earlier this week.  

“All I said is, let’s see how she does,” Trump said. “I said, put a gun in her hand and let her go out and let her face the enemy with a gun in her hand.” Trump also called Cheney a “female bully.” 

The former president suggested in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in Arizona on Thursday night that Cheney would not be such “a radical war hawk” if she were sent to fight “with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.”

“Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” Trump continued. “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building.” 

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On “Fox & Friends” this morning, Trump also addressed the backlash over racist remarks a comedian made about Puerto Rico at the former president’s rally in New York City last weekend. Trump restated his claim that nobody’s done more for the U.S. territory then him, saying that he had no idea who the comedian was and that the coverage of the offensive comments had “stained” the entire evening. 

“They made this one comedian telling one little joke early in the show, when nobody had even started going into the arena practically, they made this comedian and they made the whole weekend, and they took out this gorgeous, unbelievable patriotic evening, and they sort of stained it a little bit by a comedian that I have no idea who he is,” Trump said.



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Mel Brown, Nick Evers guide UConn to 34-27 victory over Georgia State

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Mel Brown, Nick Evers guide UConn to 34-27 victory over Georgia State


Associated Press

EAST HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Mel Brown rushed for 138 yards and a touchdown, Nick Evers threw a touchdown pass and ran for a score, and Connecticut held off Georgia State 34-27 on Friday night.

UConn (6-3) marched 59 yards in three plays the first time it had the ball, using Evers’ 2-yard touchdown toss to Louis Hansen to take a 7-0 lead. Brown’s 52-yard run on first down set up the score. Chris Freeman added a 42-yard field goal, and the Huskies led 10-0 after one quarter.

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Georgia State (2-6) capped a 10-play, 75-yard drive with Zach Gibson’s 7-yard touchdown pass to Ted Hurst to pull within 10-7 early in the second quarter. The Panthers turned a fumble recovery by Henry Bryant near midfield into a 30-yard field goal by Liam Rickman to forge a 10-10 tie. UConn answered with Freeman’s 28-yard field goal with 20 seconds remaining for a 13-10 advantage at the half.

Cam Edwards’ 46-yard run set up a 1-yard scoring plunge by Durell Robinson and the Huskies took a 10-point lead early in the third quarter. Rickman’s 20-yard field goal at the end of a 16-play drive got Georgia State within 20-13 heading to the fourth.

UConn took a two-touchdown lead with 12:54 left to play on Evers’ 5-yard touchdown run. Brown’s 31-yard scoring run on the first play following Malik Dixon-Williams’ interception and 15-yard return upped the advantage to 34-13.

Freddie Brock had a 55-yard touchdown run and Gibson ran it in from 2 yards out in the final 9:31 for Georgia State, which has lost five in a row.

Evers completed 10 of 16 passes for 75 yards and rushed nine times for 25 more. Brown did his damage on 14 carries. Edwards rushed 13 times for 88 yards as the Huskies finished with 271 on the ground.

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Gibson totaled 257 yards on 28-for-40 passing with one interception for the Panthers. Hurst caught seven passes for 91 yards and Brock had 78 yards on 10 carries.

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Early voting reaches such heights that some Georgia polls may be Election Day 'ghost town'

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Early voting reaches such heights that some Georgia polls may be Election Day 'ghost town'


STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — Flags telling people to “Vote Here” fluttered in not only English, but Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese at the Mountain Park Activity Building as a steady stream passed through its doors to cast their ballots in the 2024 election.

One by one, the voters who turned out Thursday were adding to what’s become a colossal heap of early ballots in the key swing state of Georgia. Early voting, scheduled to end Friday, has been so robust that nearly 4 million ballots could be cast before Election Day dawns on Tuesday.

“I normally try to vote early because I’m a mailman and it’s hard to me to get over here on an election day,” said Mike King of Lilburn, who voted for Trump Thursday before scattering leaves as he departed in his red pickup truck.

Voters like King are part of the reason early vote records have been shattered not only in Georgia and other presidential battlegrounds such as North Carolina but even in states without major contests on the ballot like New Jersey and Louisiana. During the pandemic in 2020, then-President Donald Trump railed against early voting and mail voting, claiming they were part of a plot to steal the election from him. In 2022, after falsely blaming his 2020 loss on early voting, he kept at it.

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In both elections, Republicans largely stayed away from voting early, preferring to do it on Election Day. This year Trump has emphasized early voting and his supporters are responding. So far Republicans have flooded the polls in places where in-person early voting is available. Though they’ve increased their mail voting too, it’s been at a much lower rate.

“The Trump effect is real,” said Jason Snead, executive director of Honest Elections, a conservative group that focuses on election policy.

So far about 64 million people have cast ballots in the 2024 election, which is more than one-third the total number who voted in 2020. Not all states register voters by party, but in those that do the early electorate is slightly more Republican than Democratic, according to AP Elections Data.

Early vote data, of course, does not tell you who will win an election. It doesn’t tell you who the voters support, only basic demographic information and sometimes party affiliation. One demographic may seem unusually energized because it dominates the early vote, only to have no more voters left to turn out on Election Day.

Campaigns encourage early voting because it lets them “bank” their most reliable supporters, freeing resources to turn out lower-propensity backers on Election Day.

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“I’ve largely viewed the idea of going back to Election Day as trying to put toothpaste back in a tube,” Snead said.

Election officials say the early vote is already racking up impressive totals. In North Carolina, all but two of 25 western counties most harmed by Hurricane Helene in late September are posting higher early in-person turnout percentages compared with 2020.

Statewide, over 3.7 million people had cast early in-person ballots as of early Friday, exceeding the early in-person total for all of 2020, the North Carolina State Board of Elections said. Early in-person voting ends Saturday afternoon in the state.

“Hurricane Helene did not stop us from voting,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the state board’s executive director and top voting official in that swing state. She added that voters have been appreciative and “we are seeing a lot of civility.”

What to know about the 2024 Election

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In Georgia, so many people have voted early that a state election official says it could be a “ghost town” at the polls on Election Day.

There’s no doubt that part of that is due to Trump. Large signs at his rallies spell out “VOTE EARLY!” and others have also been pushing Republicans to cast ballots before Tuesday, even by mail.

“This election is too important to wait!” proclaimed one flyer mailed to a voter in Georgia by the Elon Musk-funded America PAC. “President Trump is counting on patriots like you to apply for an absentee ballot and bank your vote today.”

Tona Barnes is one person who has heeded that message. Instead of voting on Election Day, she voted early for the first time on Thursday in the northern Atlanta suburb of Marietta.

“He keeps putting it out there to vote early,” she said of Trump.

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Others in Georgia, both Democrats and Republicans, say they vote early for convenience.

Ashenafi Arega, who voted Thursday for Vice President Kamala Harris at the Mountain Park Activity Building in suburban Gwinnett County, said he cast a ballot early “to save time.”

“I think on Election Day the line will be long,” said Arega, who owns an importing business. “It will be discouraging.”

Gabe Sterling, chief operating officer for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, said Wednesday that the state already had hit two-thirds of the entire turnout for the 2020 election, when Georgia set a record number of nearly 5 million votes cast.

“There’s a possibility it could be a ghost town on Election Day,” Sterling said. “We had less than a million show up during COVID in 2020 with all the uses of pre-Election Day voting.”

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Nearly as many people had voted early by this time in 2020 in Georgia, but the turnout pattern was different. For a brief time during the pandemic, Georgia allowed voters to request mail ballots online without sending in a form with a hand-inked signature, and allowed counties to set up many drive-through drop boxes. But fueled by Trump’s insistence that he had been cheated, Republican lawmakers allowed only sharply limited drop boxes going forward, imposed new deadlines on mail ballot requests and went back to requiring a hand-signed absentee request form.

That law and others in Georgia led to cries that Republicans were trying to suppress votes. Republicans said 2024’s robust early turnout proves that isn’t so.

“I think that gives the lie to this idea that having some pretty basic security measures in place somehow discourages people from voting,” said Josh McKoon, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party.

But Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye, executive director of the Democratic Party of Georgia, discounts those statements, saying recent fights about State Election Board rules, which ended with a judge throwing out the rules, prove Republicans are preparing to decry the legitimacy of any vote they don’t win in Georgia.

“I think there is no doubt that these folks were trying to muck up the waters a little bit to have something to point to potentially down the road,” Olasanoye said.

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Republicans are thrilled with the turnout in heavily GOP counties, which in some cases is approaching two-thirds of active voters. Through Thursday, about 39% of voters in the majority Black Democratic stronghold of Augusta-Richmond County had cast ballots, while nearly 54% of voters in the neighboring Republican suburb of Columbia County had voted.

“Just from a winning and losing standpoint, the more votes I have put in the bank by Friday, the fewer votes I have to push to the polls on Tuesday to win,” McKoon said.

Olasanoye, though, expressed confidence that Harris was broadening her coalition and would still win.

“Democrats and the vice president, we’re just doing all right,” he said.

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Associated Press reporters Gary Robertson and Makiya Seminera contributed from Raleigh, North Carolina.

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