Thousands evacuate as Storm Alberto barrels toward Florida

Subtropical Storm Alberto is expected to slam into the Florida Panhandle about midafternoon Monday, and wallop parts of the southeastern United States with drenching rains, blasting winds and possible tornadoes, officials said.

Forecasters said it could bring life-threatening inundation to Southern coastal states.

“It’s maintained its strength and wind speeds overnight, and it looks like it’s headed for landfall at Panama City, [Florida],” said David Roth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

“It’ll probably hit land either mid or late afternoon,” he said. “It has maximum sustained winds of 65 mph, which is about 10 miles shy of being a hurricane. This is definitely a dangerous storm.”

Thousands of Florida residents evacuated homes on Sunday as the storm headed north through the Gulf of Mexico.

The storm was about 185 kilometers southwest of Panama City, on the Gulf of Mexico coast as of 2 am EDT, the US National Hurricane Center said.

Alberto, the first named Atlantic storm of 2018, which spun up days before the formal June 1 start of the hurricane season.

There were a number of deadly hurricanes in the United States and Caribbean last year that walloped places including Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, massive power outages and devastation to hundreds of thousands of structures.

Alberto was expected to drop as much as 30 centimeters of rain, slamming an area from Mississippi to western Georgia, the Miami-based hurricane center said.

After that, it will bring powerful winds and heavy rains as it moves into the Tennessee Valley on Tuesday and Wednesday, the hurricane center said. The storm comes during the Memorial Day weekend and was expected to scramble transportation on Monday as many people return from holiday travel.