Florida’s western coast was making emergency preparations on Tuesday for the impact of Hurricane Milton, with thousands of evacuees clogging highways, contending with fuel shortages, and the mayor of Tampa warning residents bluntly “you are going to die” if they stayed behind.
The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Milton would retain major hurricane status and “expand in size” as it approached Florida after passing the Mexican city of Mérida before swerving north towards the US.
The eye of the storm closed overnight on Monday, and winds slowed slightly, before reorganizing as an “extremely dangerous” 155mph (250km/h) category 4 hurricane. As of Tuesday afternoon, the storm had restrengthened to a category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico.
Milton packed maximum sustained winds of 165mph (270km/h), the NHC said.
At 7pm CDT, the eye of the storm was 440 miles (710km) south-west of Tampa, moving east/north-east at 10mph.
“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 center said.
The greater size also enlarges the scope of the risk of storm surge to hundreds of miles of coastline. The hurricane center sees surges of 10-15ft (3-4.5 meters) north and south of Tampa Bay, in addition to the ferocious winds and risk of inland flash flooding from intense rainfall.
asdasdasdasdasd asd asdasd as das das das da sdas das das das das da das das das das dasd
Milton has the potential to be “one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida”, the NHC said.
“This is a very serious threat and residents in Florida are urged to listen to local officials,” the center said. Residents should get “their families and homes ready” – and evacuate if told to do so.
Joe Biden said that Hurricane Milton could be one of the worst storms in the US for 100 years and advised residents to leave immediately as “a matter of life and death”.
Milton is projected to hit the south-west coast of Florida by Wednesday evening local time, the US National Weather Service said in its latest update, and could cause destruction in areas already reeling from Hurricane Helene’s devastation nearly two weeks ago. Almost all of Florida’s west coast was under a hurricane warning, with more than a million people told to evacuate, fleeing potentially catastrophic damage and power outages that could last days.
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, warned residents intending to leave that they were almost out of time. “If you’re gonna get out, get out now,” he told a Tuesday afternoon press conference.
At a briefing earlier in the day, he said: “Let’s prepare for the worst and let’s pray that we get a weakening and hope for the least amount of damage as possible, but we must be prepared for a major, major impact to the west coast of Florida.”
The US president cancelled a trip to Angola and Germany less than a day after it was announced during a briefing that abruptly ended when the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, stormed out, accusing journalists of spreading misinformation in response to questions about emergency disaster funding.
The president also approved DeSantis’s request for a federal emergency declaration and said disinformation in the wake of Hurricane Helene was “unAmerican”.
That came after a DeSantis aide said the governor was not taking Vice-President Kamala Harris’s calls, pointing to the intense politicization around the response to Helene and Milton.
