MIAMI (AP) — Crews evacuated dozens of people from vulnerable locations in the northwestern Bahamas as Tropical Storm Nicole approached Wednesday and residents of Florida braced for the storm, which could strengthen to a rare November hurricane.
“We are forecasting it to become a hurricane as it nears the northwestern Bahamas, and remain a hurricane as it approaches the east coast of Florida,” Daniel Brown, a senior huricane specialist at the Miami-based National Hurricane Center, said Wednesday.
Nicole is the first storm to hit the Bahamas since Hurricane Dorian, a devastating Category 5 storm that struck the archipelago in 2019, before hitting storm-weary Florida on Wednesday night and moving into Georgia on Thursday.
In the Bahamas, officials said early Wednesday that only a few people were in the more than two dozen shelters that opened. Flooding and power outages were reported in Abaco ahead of the storm’s arrival.
In advance of the storm, Palm Beach International Airport closed Wednesday morning, and Daytona Beach International Airport planned to cease operations at 12:30 p.m. Orlando International Airport, the seventh busiest in the U.S., was set to close at 4 p.m. Wednesday. Further south, officials said Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and Miami International Airport were experiencing some flight delays and cancellations but both planned to remain open.
Many school districts in Florida also canceled classes on Wednesday and Thursday.
Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Brave Davis, who is at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, said he has mobilized all government resources as the storm nears.
At 10 a.m., the storm was 25 miles (40 kilometers) east northeast of Great Abaco Island and about 210 miles (340 kilometers) east of West Palm Beach, Florida. With maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph), the storm was moving at 12 mph (19 kph).
New warnings and watches were issued for many parts of Florida, including the southwestern Gulf coastline which was devastated by Hurricane Ian, which struck as a Category 4 storm on Sept. 28. The storm destroyed homes and damaged crops, including orange groves, across the state.
Ian lashed much of the central region of Florida with heavy rainfall, causing flooding that many residents are still dealing with as Nicole approaches.
In Florida, the “combination of a dangerous storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters moving inland from the shoreline,” the hurricane center’s 10 a.m. advisory said.