Hurricane Milton threatens already battered Florida

Tampa — Hurricane Milton was expected to expand grow on Tuesday as it chugged past Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula en route to Florida's battered Gulf Coast, where more than 1-million people were ordered to evacuate before the monster storm arrived.

Florida's densely populated west coast, still reeling from the devastating Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago, braced for landfall in the Tampa Bay area on Wednesday.

A direct hit on the bay would be the first since 1921, when the now-sprawling Tampa-St Petersburg-Clearwater area was a relative backwater.

“Milton has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida,” the US National Hurricane Center said.

The centre forecast storm surges of 3m to 4.5m along a stretch of coastline north and south of Tampa Bay, which could swamp low-lying areas. Forecasts of 127mm to 254mm or more of rainfall threatened flash flooding farther inland.

Some of the area’s 3-million residents rushed to dispose of mounds of debris left by Helene before heeding the evacuation orders.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis said on Tuesday the state would activate 8,000 National Guard members and is positioning truckloads of supplies and equipment near the area where the storm was expected to make landfall.

“Now is the time to execute your plan ... but that time is running out,” he said during a press conference, urging residents to heed warnings from forecasters and local evacuation orders.

At Tropicana Field in St Petersburg, thousands of green emergency camp beds were set up ahead of the storm’s arrival.

On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden postponed his October 10-15 trip to Germany and Angola to oversee preparations for Milton and the response following the hurricane, the White House said.

Biden urged those who have been ordered to leave before Milton makes landfall in Florida to evacuate immediately, saying it was a matter of life and death.

Fleeing the storm

State ferry boat operator Ken Wood spent Tuesday morning racing to pack up his truck in the Gulf city of Dunedin about 39km west of Tampa so he could avoid the brunt of the storm with Andy, his 16-year-old cat.

Two weeks ago, Wood defied evacuation orders and hunkered down in his house during Helene, a night he described as one of the most harrowing experiences of his life. “We won’t make the same mistake again,” he said.

Pinellas County, which includes St Petersburg, ordered the evacuation of more than 500,000 people. Lee County said 416,000 people lived in its mandatory evacuation zones. At least six other coastal counties ordered evacuations, including Tampa’s Hillsborough County.

Motorists waited to fill their tanks in lines snaking around petrol stations, only to find that some were out of fuel, according to local media and social-media posts.

By early Tuesday, bumper-to-bumper traffic choked roads leading out of Tampa, the Tampa Bay Times reported.

With maximum sustained winds of 241km/h, Milton was downgraded from a category 5 to a category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, according to the US National Hurricane Center’s latest advisory on Tuesday.

While fluctuations in intensity are expected, Milton is forecast to remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida, causing catastrophic damage and power outages expected to last days.

Fed by warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean, as it surged from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane — the most powerful — in less than 24 hours.

Milton is expected to grow in size before making landfall on Wednesday, putting swathes of coastline within the storm-surge danger zone, said Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center.

The area placed under hurricane warnings is home to more than 9.3-million residents.

Relief efforts remain ongoing throughout much of the US Southeast in the wake of Helene, a category 4 hurricane that made landfall in Florida on September 26, killed more than 200 people across six states and caused billions of dollars in damage.

Asheville and other mountain communities of western North Carolina, hundreds of kilometres inland, were particularly hard-hit.

Reuters