More than 1 million people warned to get out before Hurricane Milton hits Florida
Tampa hasn't been in the direct path of a major hurricane in over a century
Floridians on Wednesday had one final day to evacuate or hunker down ahead of the Category 5 Hurricane Milton, potentially one of the most destructive ever to hit the Gulf Coast of Florida.
With more than 1 million people in coastal areas under evacuation orders, those fleeing for higher ground clogged highways and gas stations ran out of fuel, further rattling a region still recovering from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago.
Milton, which exploded on Monday into one of the most intense Atlantic hurricanes on record, was forecast to make landfall late Wednesday or early Thursday, threatening a stretch of Florida's densely populated west coast that is still reeling from the devastating Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago.
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. Today it is home to more than three million people.
The storm is on a rare west-to-east path through the Gulf of Mexico and is likely to bring a deadly storm surge of three metres or more to much of Florida's Gulf Coast.
Officials from U.S. President Joe Biden to Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned people in evacuation zones to get out or risk death.
Michael Tylenda, who was visiting his son in Tampa, said he was heeding that advice.
"If anybody knows anything about Florida, when you don't evacuate when you're ordered to, you can pretty much die," Tylenda said. "They've had a lot of people here stay at their homes and they end up drowning. It's just not worth it. You know, the house can be replaced. The stuff can be replaced. So it's just better to get out of town."
Milton packed maximum sustained winds of 260 kilometres per hour, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said, putting it at the highest level on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.
While wind speeds could drop and downgrade Milton to a lesser category, the size of the storm was growing, putting ever more coastal areas in danger.
At 10 p.m. ET, the eye of the storm was 650 kilometres southwest of Tampa, moving northeast at 19 kilometres per hour.
Milton was expected to maintain hurricane strength as it crosses the Florida peninsula, posing storm surge danger on the state's Atlantic Coast as well.
"Milton's wind field is expected to expand as it approaches Florida. In fact, the official forecast shows the hurricane and tropical-storm-force winds roughly doubling in size by the time it makes landfall," the hurricane centre said.
The greater size also enlarges the scope of the risk of storm surge to hundreds of kilometres of coastline. The hurricane centre sees surges of three to 4.5 metres north and south of Tampa Bay, in addition to the ferocious winds and risk of inland flash flooding from intense rainfall.
About 2.8 per cent of U.S. gross domestic product is in the direct path of Milton, Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, wrote on Tuesday. Airlines, energy firms and a Universal Studios theme park were among the companies beginning to halt their Florida operations as they braced for disruptions.
Finding a way out
Hurricane Helene left the Tampa Bay area more vulnerable when it hit the Gulf Coast's barrier islands and beaches on Sept. 26, sweeping away tonnes of sand, knocking down dunes and blowing away dune grass, said Isaac Longley, a meteorologist with the commercial forecasting company AccuWeather.
Five-thousand National Guard members have been deployed, with another 3,000 on hand for the storm's aftermath, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said.
U.S. President Joe Biden, who postponed an overseas trip to supervise the storm response, urged those under evacuation orders to leave immediately, saying it was a matter of life and death.
More than a dozen coastal counties issued mandatory evacuation orders, including Tampa's Hillsborough County. 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.
Mobile homes, nursing homes and assisted living facilities also faced mandatory evacuation.
In Fort Myers, mobile home-dweller Jamie Watts and his wife took refuge in a hotel after losing their previous trailer to Hurricane Ian in 2022.
"My wife's happy. We're not in that tin can," Watts said.
"We stayed during Ian and literally watched my roof tear off my house and it put a turmoil in us. So this time I'm going to be a little safer," he said.
Motorists waited to fill their tanks in lines snaking around gas stations, only to find that some were out of fuel. State police provided escorts to fuel trucks replenishing gas stations, DeSantis said.
By early Tuesday, bumper-to-bumper traffic choked roads leading out of Tampa.
Musician Mark Feinman, 38, said it took 13 hours to drive his family more than 800 kilometres from St. Petersburg, Fla., to Pensacola, Fla. Some drivers sped through breakdown lanes and across grass medians to cut ahead, causing accidents, he said.
About 17 per cent of Florida's nearly 8,000 gas stations had run out of fuel by late Tuesday, according to markets tracker GasBuddy.
U.S. airlines are cancelling flights and adjusting schedules, with some Florida airports closing in anticipation of the hurricane's landfall. In response to the disruptions, some airlines, including Air Canada, have added extra capacity to move people out of Florida.
Rapid intensification
Fuelled by warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic.
It had weakened to a Category 4 hurricane on Tuesday but regained strength. Milton is forecast to remain an extremely dangerous hurricane after landfall in Florida, causing catastrophic damage and power outages expected to last days.
The storm already caused some havoc in Mexico, but Gov. Joaquin Diaz Mena of Yucatan state said much of the damage reported so far had been minor. Thousands of utility customers lost power.
Relief efforts are still under way throughout much of the U.S. Southeast in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people across six states and caused billions of dollars in damage.
With files from The Associated Press