At least one dead in Florida as storms continue to batter the South. DeSantis declares a state of emergency

Fierce hurricane-force storms killed at least one woman in Florida on Friday, while a week of deadly storms continued in the South, with uprooted trees slamming into homes and knocking out power to thousands of people in several states.

Tallahassee city officials said wind gusts of 80 to 100 miles per hour were reported in Florida’s capital, speeds exceeding the intensity of a hurricane. Images posted on social media showed mangled metal and other debris from damaged buildings scattered in some areas.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order Friday declaring a state of emergency for 12 counties in the northern part of the storm-affected state.

A statement on the Tallahassee government website said crews scrambled to repair 100 broken utility poles while half the homes and businesses remained without power in a city of 200,000. It said the National Weather Service was reviewing the paths of three potential tornadoes.

“Our area experienced catastrophic wind damage,” Tallahassee Mayor John Dailey said on the social platform X.

Crews unclearly told customers that recovery could take days. City officials expect work to restore power to continue through the weekend.

City spokeswoman Alison Faris told The Tallahassee Democrat that the extent of the damage made recovery difficult as crews focused on repairing transmission infrastructure before they could begin work on distributing electricity to homes and businesses supplied with electricity.

“First the transmission and then we restore the circuits, which affects the distribution,” Faris told the Democrat. “All hands are on the gears. Some circuits should be repaired here shortly.”

The first wave of more than 215 employees from 20 utilities in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina have arrived to help crews repair the electrical system.

The sheriff’s office for Leon County, which includes Tallahassee, said in a Facebook post Friday that a woman was killed when a tree fell on her family’s home.

The storm that hit Tallahassee early Friday also knocked down two chimneys from homes in a complex where fallen trees covered a number of cars. The fence remained hanging at Florida State University’s baseball stadium, where classes were canceled Friday.

DeSantis said on social media Friday that the state Division of Emergency Management was working with local officials to “do everything possible to get the lives of our residents back to normal as quickly as possible.”

The woman killed in Florida was at least the fifth death caused by severe weather in the United States this week. A powerful tornado that ripped through a small town in Oklahoma on Monday claimed one life, and Wednesday’s storms are reported to have killed two people in Tennessee and one person in North Carolina.

An estimated 201,000 homes and businesses from Mississippi to North Carolina were affected by power as of Friday afternoon, according to the tracking website poweroutage.us. Most of those outages occurred in Florida, where nearly 142,000 customers lost lights and air conditioning.

In Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, authorities on Friday urged residents to conserve and boil water as a precaution after a power outage at one of their major water treatment plants. JXN Water, the local water supplier, said customers could expect lower water pressure as workers assessed damage from overnight storms.

“It will take many hours for the system to recover, and in some locations it may take longer,” Ted Henifin, the water system manager, said in a statement.

In other parts of the South, storm damage from earlier in the week has been repaired. In the rural farming community of Vidalia, Georgia, and surrounding Toombs County, officials said a tornado left a roughly 2-mile-long path of destruction Thursday afternoon.

About 10 homes had trees fall on or through the roofs, and crews worked through the night to remove about 50 downed trees that were blocking roads, said Lynn Moore, emergency management director for Toombs County. A dozen car wrecks were reported over the course of the storm, Moore said, but no one in the county was injured.

“We’re lucky it wasn’t stronger than it was,” Moore said.

Also on Thursday, the weather service reported a hurricane-force wind gust of 76 miles per hour in Autauga County, Alabama. And one person was injured in Rankin County, Mississippi, after a tree fell on a home, according to weather service damage reports.

As of Monday, 39 states have been threatened by severe weather. About 220 million people were at risk of severe weather on Wednesday and Thursday, said Matthew Elliott, a meteorologist with the Storm Prediction Center.

The weather follows a stormy April that saw 300 confirmed tornadoes in the U.S., the second most on record this month and the most since 2011. Both the Plains and the Midwest have been hit by tornadoes this spring.