Tropical depression Mindy dumps rain on Georgia and South Carolina, then moves into the Atlantic
Tropical depression Mindy dumped rain along the Georgia and South Carolina coasts Thursday during a trek across land before moving well out over the Atlantic Ocean.
Mindy was a brief-lived tropical storm that had formed Wednesday in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. The storm made landfall Wednesday night in St. Vincent Island, Fla., and then was downgraded to a depression, which dumped rain across the Florida Panhandle and into south Georgia and South Carolina.
The storm was in the Atlantic on Thursday evening about 110 miles east-southeast of Charleston, S.C., and moving east-northeast at 23 mph with top sustained winds of 35 mph, forecasters said.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami said gradual weakening was expected, and Mindy is forecast to become a remnant low sometime Friday.
Florida’s Big Bend area was already saturated from rain dumped by Hurricanes Elsa and Ida. Some residents in low-lying Dixie County have had to move out of their homes, which were flooded before Mindy brought more rain.
Diane Van Hook has been living at a hotel for weeks because her property is flooded and there’s no electricity in her home.
“There’s no hope of going home anytime soon because of how deep the water is,” Van Hook told WGFL-TV in Gainesville on Wednesday. “There’s no place for us to even walk, you know. I had to remove my horse from the property, and I lost my chickens.”
Climate change is making the world more prone to floods like those in China and Europe and to heat waves and fires like those in the U.S. and Russia.
Mandy Lemmermen, spokesperson for the county’s emergency management office, told the television station that as the water recedes in some areas, it rises in others.
“Now we’re seeing where people who weren’t flooded a week or two ago are now flooded as the water moves throughout the county,” she said, adding that the area expected between 2 to 4 inches of rain from Mindy.
No coastal watches or warnings were in effect late Thursday as Mindy moved offshore.
Mindy was the 13th named storm of what has been another busy Atlantic hurricane season. According to a tweet from Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach, the average date for the 13th named storm from 1991 to 2020 was Oct. 24.
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