Hurricane Milton is set to approach the Florida peninsula as a catastrophic Category 4 storm, bearing down on a region still struggling to recover from Helene’s devastation.
Milton’s top wind speed slowed slightly to 249km/h (155m/hr), the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in its latest advisory. The system is expected to glance off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula on Tuesday, before heading toward Florida on Wednesday.
“While fluctuations in intensity are expected, Milton is forecast to remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida,” the advisory said.
With winds this intense, Milton is capable of collapsing homes, flattening trees and triggering power outages that could last weeks to months. It’s difficult for hurricanes to maintain their maximum strength for long, however, so Milton’s winds may drop as it nears Florida’s west coast.
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Widespread electricity outages are likely and a small shift in Milton’s trajectory can determine whether it strikes a densely populated area, said Florida Gov Ron DeSantis, who has declared an emergency in 51 counties.
“Please, if you are in the Tampa Bay area, you need to evacuate,” Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said at a briefing Monday. “Drowning deaths due to storm surge are 100% preventable if you leave.”
Officials in the Yucatán Peninsula issued their own evacuation calls as the storm lashed the coast with wave heights forecast to top 6m (19ft). Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum and Yucatán governor Joaquin Diaz Mena urged citizens in the area to follow official instructions and go to shelters to stay safe. Authorities have also shut ports in the Gulf of Mexico and suspended schools in some municipalities of Quintana Roo state.
It is not clear exactly where in Florida Milton will make landfall. Various computer forecast models are at odds, and the hurricane centre says errors of as much as 100 miles are possible in the days before a storm comes ashore. Milton likely will make landfall between 5pm and 9pm local time on Wednesday, said Tyler Roys, a meteorologist with AccuWeather.
Although Milton has been downgraded from its earlier Category 5 status, it initially quickly escalated in strength from hot Gulf of Mexico waters that also intensified the deadly Helene less than two weeks ago.
Mr Roys said a ridge of high pressure that is setting temperature records in Phoenix and across the southwest is helping steer Milton on an unusual track from west to east across the Gulf. No storm has blazed such a path since 1900.
In addition to packing ferocious winds, Milton is forecast to push a wall of water on shore that may reach as high as 15ft in Tampa Bay, the NHC said.
Hurricane Helene brought “the most significant surge this area has seen in quite some time, and we’re already going to top that just two weeks later,” said Matt Anderson, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Tampa. “We’re now expecting the worst storm surge we’ve seen in Tampa Bay in recorded history just given the track, the intensity, and where Milton is predicted to make landfall.”
Nasa and SpaceX have postponed Thursday’s launch of the agency’s multibillion-dollar Europa Clipper mission to explore one of Jupiter’s moons. The agency and SpaceX have launch opportunities until November 6th.
Milton will be the second major storm to strike Florida in less than two weeks and the fifth hurricane to hit the US this year. At least 227 people died when Hurricane Helene struck Florida’s Big Bend area in late September and then spread flooding into the Appalachian Mountains, wreaking havoc across the region.
In addition to Milton, the hurricane centre is now watching an area of low pressure between Florida’s east coast and the Bahamas that has a 20 per cent chance of becoming a tropical cyclone in the next week. – Bloomberg