She has demoted but remains dangerous.

Storm Sally swept through the US state of Alabama and northwestern Florida overnight from Wednesday, September 16 to Thursday, September 17, causing extensive flooding.

Streets have been submerged and hundreds of thousands of homes are without electricity.

One person is believed to have died in the coastal town of Orange Beach in Alabama, but Mayor Tony Kennon said he had no more information, the AL.com news site reported.

In total, according to the Poweroutage.com site, more than 510,000 homes had no electricity on Wednesday in these two states.

Tropical depression

Hurricane Sally made landfall at 4:45 a.m. (9.45 a.m. GMT) Wednesday in Gulf Shores, a small town in Alabama.

It was then in category 2, and has since been downgraded to tropical storm, then to tropical depression.

The winds carried by Sally have calmed down and now reach a maximum speed of 55 km / h.

The low is moving slowly (at around 15 km / h), which means continuous rains over the same areas for an extended period, intensifying the rising waters, according to the latest National Hurricane Center (NHC) bulletin released at 3 pm GMT Thursday.

"Catastrophic and historic floods are underway," the institution also warned.

The streets of the city of Pensacola (northwest Florida), where some 50,000 people live, were turned into torrents, according to numerous videos circulating on social networks.

The passage of the hurricane had "devastating effects," David Morgan, Sheriff of Escambia County, where Pensacola is located, told a press conference Wednesday morning.

"We anticipate evacuations which will number in the thousands" when these are possible, he warned.

"No one was prepared"

The situation "is bad," he said, reporting that a portion of a bridge in the city had likely collapsed.

"It's going to take a considerable amount of time to clean this up."

"Nobody was prepared for (a hurricane) of category 2. Me and a hundred neighbors, we did not put wooden planks or shutters" on our houses, explains to AFP David Triana, 57 years old , which resides in the small town of Navarre, near Pensacola.

Relief operations were underway and shelters were opened in the area, but authorities urged people to stay safe in their homes when possible.

"Extremely dangerous situation"

About 40 miles away in Alabama, footage showed the marina in the seaside town of Orange Beach being swept up, with pleasure boats blown by the winds to the docks amid debris.

Authorities in Baldwin County, where Orange Beach is located, alerted Wednesday morning to an "extremely dangerous situation", with "serious and extensive damage".

Because of the weather conditions, the governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, where a state of emergency was declared on Monday, explained to the population on Wednesday that "delays were going to be recorded in the restarting of the electricity and other essential services ".

Governor Ron DeSantis has also declared a state of emergency for counties in northwest Florida.

The UN soon to run out of first names

Sally was to cross southeastern Alabama overnight before arriving in central Georgia and South Carolina on Thursday, still accompanied by torrential rains, the National Hurricane Center said.

As the surface of the oceans warms, hurricanes are getting stronger, according to scientists, who predict an increase in the proportion of category 4 and 5 cyclones.

Paulette, René, Teddy and Vicky: with Sally, no less than five storms occurred simultaneously over the Atlantic at the beginning of September, a record since 1971. There have been so many tropical storms in this ocean this year that the UN, which baptizes them, is in the process of running out of first names, for only the second time in history.

The US meteorological services had predicted that the hurricane season in the Atlantic, which lasts from June 1 to November 30, would be extremely "active", with between seven and eleven hurricanes.

With AFP

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