Idalia appears to be coming ashore near Steinhatchee, Florida. As I was writing this post reports came in that Idalia made landfall at Keaton Beach, just northwest of Steinhatchee, at around 8am. Wind speeds had dropped just enough that Idalia was “downgraded” from category 4 to category 3. But still, it’s a devastating disaster from Tampa all up the Gulf coast to Tallahassee.

What is remarkable is to look at the map and see Idalia’s influence up into south Georgia, all the way to Savannah and Charleston, SC. It also shows why you don’t want a hurricane to pass under you. The northwest quadrant is where the most wind and rain is generated in a hurricane. Orlando is still getting rain bands, with intermittent rain and wind. Nothing like Florida’s Big Bend area.

Watching and waiting for Hurricane Idalia to pass us. Current forecast tracking of the eye has Idalia going north of Tampa, which puts it a good ways north of Orlando. This was taken from my iPhone around 8am this morning with Apple’s weather app in map mode. I’ve also been keeping tabs on the hurricane with Weather Underground’s spaghetti modeling, which keeps consistently predicting a track that side-swipes Tallahassee. That’s not so good for Tallahassee, as it tends to flood in weather such as this.

Models are already forecasting this to be a major hurricane before landfall, which means category 3 or more. Where-ever it finally comes ashore, a lot of people who can ill afford the damage are going to suffer quite a bit of it. Florida still a lot of folks down in southwest Florida who are still trying to recover from last year’s hurricane Ian.

Update 5:30 Local Orlando

The rain bands are now coming through.