Fort Myers suffers intense flooding as Hurricane Idalia is set to slam Florida — fueled by rare blue moon

Intense flooding transformed Fort Myers roadways into rivers Tuesday as “life-threatening” Hurricane Idalia was set to slam Florida’s southwest coast — fueled by a rare blue supermoon.

The outer bands of the major Category 3 hurricane swept over the metro area, bringing with it strong storm surges that have already flooded residential streets with knee-deep water.

Forecasters warned that Wednesday night’s blue supermoon will also likely cause higher-than-normal tides, meaning some areas of the state can expect storm surges to reach 15 feet.

“I would say the timing is pretty bad for this one,” said meteorologist Brian Haines of the National Weather Service office in Charleston, SC.

Though Idalia is still roughly 240 miles southwest of Tampa, the rising tides have washed onto highways and overfilled canals.

One eerie video showed high-speed winds ripping through palm trees and kicking up miniature sand storms as heavy, dark clouds moved across the sky.

At 2 p.m., Idalia was carrying maximum sustained winds of 90 mph and moving north at 15 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.

Meteorologists said the substantial surf and rip currents along the East Coast were “ongoing.”

And the wicked weather is only expected to accelerate — including reaching upwards of 120 mph winds — as the catastrophic storm moves to make landfall sometime between 6 a.m. and noon Wednesday.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has urged residents in low-lying communities to evacuate in search of higher ground before expected devastating flash floods.

“The time is running out very, very rapidly,” he said at an afternoon news briefing.

He declared a state of emergency Monday for 46 of the state’s 67 counties as thousands of National Guard troops were deployed to the area ahead of the storm’s impact.

The NHC said Idalia’s center would likely hit Florida’s coastline somewhere in the Big Bend region, roughly between the inland cities of Tallahassee and Gainesville.

No major hurricanes on record have ever passed through the area, making Idalia “an unprecedented event,” according to the National Weather Service in Tallahassee.

The blue supermoon is expected to only worsen the situation later Wednesday. The moon won’t actually be blue. The term just refers to the second full moon of the month — the only one occurring this year — and the fact that it appears larger than normal in the sky. The occurrence is so rare that the phrase, “Once in a blue moon” comes from it, according to Atlas Obscura.

After landing in the Big Bend region, Idalia is then forecast to cross the Florida peninsula and drench southern Georgia and the Carolinas on Thursday.

Idalia grew from a tropical storm into a hurricane early Tuesday, a day after passing west of Cuba, where it damaged homes and flooded villages.

The storm is in line to become the fourth major hurricane to strike Florida over the past seven years, after Irma in 2017, Michael in 2018 and Ian, which peaked at Category 5, in September.

With Post wires