TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Hurricane Milton crashed into Florida as a Category 3 storm Wednesday, pounding the coast with ferocious winds of over 100 mph (160 kph) and producing a series of tornadoes around the state. Tampa avoided a direct hit.
The cyclone had maximum sustained winds of 120 mph (205 kph) as it roared ashore near Siesta Key, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center said. Siesta Key is a prosperous strip of white-sand beaches that's home to 5,500 people about 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of Tampa. The storm was still bringing a potentially deadly storm surge to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast, including densely populated areas such as Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota and Fort Myers.
Heavy rains were also likely to cause flooding inland along rivers and lakes as Milton traverses the Florida peninsula as a hurricane, eventually to emerge in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday.
More than 1 million homes and businesses were without power Wednesday night in Florida, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports. The highest number of outages were in Sarasota County and neighboring Manatee County.
Milton slammed into a Florida region still reeling from Hurricane Helene, which caused heavy damage to beach communities with storm surge and killed a dozen people in seaside Pinellas County alone.
Earlier, officials issued dire warnings to flee or face grim odds of survival.
“This is it, folks,” said Cathie Perkins, emergency management director in Pinellas County, which sits on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay. “Those of you who were punched during Hurricane Helene, this is going to be a knockout. You need to get out, and you need to get out now.”
By late afternoon, some officials said the time had passed for such efforts. By the evening, some counties announced they has suspended emergency services.
“Unless you really have a good reason to leave at this point, we suggest you just hunker down,” Polk County Emergency Management Director Paul Womble said in a public update.
Multiple tornadoes spawned by the hurricane tore across Florida, the twisters acting as a dangerous harbingers of Milton’s approach. Videos posted to social media sites showed large funnel clouds over neighborhoods in Palm Beach County and elsewhere in the state.
Milton, which has fluctuated in intensity as it approached Florida, was a Category 3 hurricane Wednesday evening. It was expected to remain a hurricane after hitting land and plowing across the state, including the heavily populated Orlando area, through Thursday.
“That doesn't mean that it couldn't happen,” said Luisa Meshekoff, who nevertheless was staying put with her partner and eight cats in their home, a brick warehouse in a mandatory evacuation zone in Tampa's Channel District. The couple considered leaving but felt bringing the cats to a shelter wasn't an option, and they worried that getting stuck on the roads could be dangerous.
“I think if you have water and batteries, everything’s OK,” Meshekoff said. “I could be singing a different tune by 2 in the morning.”
Milton threatened communitiesstill reeling two weeks after Hurricane Helene flooded streets and homes in western Florida and left at least 230 people dead across the South. In many places along the coast, municipalities raced to collect and dispose of debris before Milton’s winds and storm surge could toss it around and compound any damage.
With the storm weaker but growing in size, the surge was projected to reach as high as 9 feet (2.7 meters) in Tampa Bay.
At a news conference in Tallahassee, Gov. Ron DeSantis described deployment of a wide range of resources, including 9,000 National Guard members from Florida and other states; over 50,000 utility workers from as far as California; and highway patrol cars with sirens to escort gasoline tankers to replenish supplies so people could fill up their tanks before evacuating.
“Unfortunately, there will be fatalities. I don’t think there’s any way around that,” DeSantis said.
