Up to a foot of rain

A week after Hurricane Helene made landfall, Florida is bracing for another round of heavy rain and strong winds from a tropical system moving across the Atlantic.

The potential storm could bring up to a foot of rain to the southern half of the state beginning early next week, according to commercial forecaster AccuWeather Inc. Tampa could see 4 to eight inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of rainfall, and the Greater Bend region — where Helene made landfall last week — is likely to get at least 1 to 2 inches. That could complicate cleanup operations at a time when Florida is struggling to get the lights back on, with more than 21,000 homes and businesses still in the dark, according to PowerOutage.us.

“It looks like most of the rain will be south of the areas that basically occupied Helene’s eyewall,” said Alex DaSilva, senior hurricane expert for AccuWeather. “It’s a little bit of good news, but the Florida peninsula south of Orlando could be at risk of some pretty significant flooding next week.”

There is a slim chance the system will develop into a hurricane as it moves into the Gulf of Mexico, DaSilva said. It will encounter plenty of fuel because sea surface temperatures are well above 80 degrees, “which is usually the magic number we look at as the threshold” for hurricane formation. But substantial wind shear and dry air over the ocean will likely help keep the storm under control.

Forecasters are closely monitoring two other storms in the Atlantic: Hurricane Kirk and potential Hurricane Leslie. Kirk has been upgraded to a Category 4 storm but is not expected to make landfall before it begins to break up next week, according to the US National Hurricane Center. Tropical Storm Leslie is trailing 580 miles (933 kilometers) west-southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands and is likely to reach hurricane strength on Friday.

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Photo: Floodwaters after Hurricane Helene in Tarpon Springs, Florida on September 27. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

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