Clean-Up Starts as Debby Heads Out

Tropical Depression Debby retreated to the Atlantic today after flooding parts of north Florida with four days of torrential downpours.

Forecasters expect the storm to lose organization and to be downgraded to a tropical wave over the next 48 hours as it continues to move northeast.

The storm dumped as much as 26 inches of rain in some spots as it stalled in the Gulf of Mexico and then made a slow creep from the Gulf Coast to Jacksonville.

Thousands are still away from their homes under mandatory evacuation orders, according to CNN. Forecasters still predict risks from coastal flooding in North Florida and South Georgia, caused by Debby's storm surge, according to the Florida Times Union.

The storm claimed three lives in Florida, and a South Carolina man may have died in Alabama when he was swept to sea, the AP reported.

As of Wednesday morning, 11,000 residents were without power across 39 counties, according to CNN.

Tourism was impacted along the Gulf Coast, an area abandoned by tourists in 2005 by Hurricanes Katrina and Dennis and then again in 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill fouled the coast.

"We've had bad luck on this island," JoAnn Shiver, vice president of the Buccaneer Inn on St. George Island near Apalachicola, Fla., told the AP. "We've had Dennis. We've had Katrina. We had the oil spill."

That island, among others, was closed to the public Wednesday. Interstate 10, the main east-west route for the state, re-opened around mid day Wednesday.

President Barack Obama called Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Tuesday to ensure the state had "no unmet needs" as it recovered from Debby's damage.

Debby is the fourth named storm of the 2012 Atlantic Hurricane season. The storm's arrival was the first time in modern record keeping that four storms emerged before July.