Duke Energy staged 8,000 crew members to respond to outages ahead of the storm, with about 4,000 in the Villages that can respond around Tampa Bay or further north, as needed. Helene is expected to pass Tampa Bay over the course of Thursday afternoon and make landfall in the Big Bend region by the evening.

As Hurricane Helene passes through the Tampa Bay area, it could bring wind gusts of up to 75 miles per hour. So what happens to all the cranes being used to build high-rise towers across the region? Some can be dropped down to a lower height.

The Sunshine Skyway Bridge is closed, as of just before 2 p.m. on Thursday, as outer bands from Hurricane Helene, now a Category 3 hurricane churning in the Gulf of Mexico on its way to landfall in the Big Bend area, bear down on the Tampa Bay area with tropical storm-force winds.