April 17, 2025
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 into 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 hurricane 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. Nicole is then expected to hit Florida on Wednesday night and move 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.
“We are asking people to please take it (seriously),” said Andrea Newbold with the Disaster Management Unit for Social Services. “Don’t wait until the last minute.”
Residents in at least three Florida counties — Flagler, Palm Beach and Volusia — were ordered to evacuate from barrier islands, low-lying areas and mobile homes. The evacuation orders went into effect Wednesday morning. Officials at Orlando International Airport, the seventh busiest in the U.S., said commercial operations would stop Wednesday afternoon until it was safe to resume flights. And Palm Beach International Airport planned to close.
In preparation, many school districts in Florida canceled classes on Wednesday and Thursday.
Nicole could intensify into a rare November hurricane before hitting Florida, where only two have made landfall since recordkeeping began in 1853 — the 1935 Yankee Hurricane and Hurricane Kate in 1985.
Brown said the storm will affect a large part of the state.
“Because the system is so large, really almost the entire east coast of Florida except the extreme southeastern part and the Keys is going to receive tropical storm force winds," he said.
The storm is then expected to move across central and northern Florida into southern Georgia on Thursday, forecasters said. It was then forecast to move across the Carolinas on Friday.
“We are going to be concerned with rainfall as we get later into the week across portions of the southeastern United States and southern Appalachians, where there could be some flooding, flash flooding with that rainfall," Brown said.
