Hurricane Milton has begun the process of making landfall with the National Hurricane Centre saying an extreme wind warning was now in force.
”The northern eyewall of Hurricane Milton is now spreading ashore in the Tampa/St Petersburg metro area” it said around midday NZ time.
The “eyewall” refers to the violent storms surrounding the eye of the hurricane.
US President Joe Biden earlier said the storm is expected to be one of the most destructive hurricanes in Florida in over a century, with the potential to wipe out entire communities.
Emergency services have been grounded with people urged to shelter in place.
While Milton slightly weakened on Wednesday afternoon to a Category 3 hurricane, the third-highest level, it was growing in size as it approached Florida and remained extremely dangerous with maximum sustained winds of 195km/h, the hurricane centre said.
The Sarasota Police Department said ”we will now wait out the storm, just like you, and once it passes, we will begin our rescue and recovery process.
“You need to shelter in place. If you need help, we cannot respond. Please do not venture out and put your life in danger.”
Waikato woman Megan Hyland earlier fled Orlando out of fear of being trapped. The journey to Atlanta out of harm’s way took her 11 hours in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, double the usual time. She said the foyer of the hotel was packed with “stressed” people when she left. “It was like Noah’s Ark.”
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The storm was on a collision course for the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, home to more than three million people, though forecasters said the path could vary before the storm crosses the coast late on Wednesday night.
The US National Hurricane Center described Milton as a “catastrophic” and “dangerous” major hurricane, packing maximum sustained winds of 260km/h, putting it at the highest level on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.
Weather conditions were expected to start deteriorating in the afternoon, it said in an advisory.
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 of flooding to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Officials from US 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.”
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.
In its latest advisory, the NHC said Milton was expected to turn to the east-northeast and east on Thursday and Friday.
Early on Wednesday, the eye of the storm was about 480km southwest of Tampa.
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 became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic, growing from a category one to a category five in less than 24 hours.
“These extremely warm sea surface temperatures provide the fuel necessary for the rapid intensification that we saw taking place to occur,” said climate scientist Daniel Gilford of Climate Central, a non-profit research group.
“We know that as human beings increase the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, largely by burning fossil fuels, we are increasing that temperature all around the planet.”
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.”
Bumper-to-bumper traffic choked roads leading out of Tampa on Tuesday, when about 17% of Florida’s nearly 8000 petrol stations had run out of fuel, according to fuel markets tracker GasBuddy.
Final rides at Disney
At Walt Disney World in Orlando, which was expected to receive a big hit once Milton crosses the peninsula, visitors were getting a few rides in before the theme parks close shortly after midday, reports AFP.
“It’s safe and we’re here, so might as well,” said Lindsay Moore, 42, who flew in from Hawaii over the weekend.
“We thought about cancelling but airlines wouldn’t let us.”
Trump has repeatedly fuelled conspiracy theories and disinformation about supposed failure by Biden and his vice president, the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
“Western North Carolina, and the whole state, for that matter, has been totally and incompetently mismanaged by Harris/Biden,” Trump said Wednesday on his Truth Social network.
“Hold on, and vote these horrible ‘public servants’ out of office.”
Harris attacked Trump late Tuesday, asking: “Have you no empathy, man, for the suffering of other people?”
Scientists say global warming has a role in intense storms as warmer ocean surfaces release more water vapour, providing additional energy for storms, which exacerbates their winds.
A report by the World Weather Attribution group published Wednesday said Hurricane Helene’s torrential rain and powerful winds were made about 10% more intense due to climate change.
“The tragedy is that climate scientists have been warning of this for decades,” said John Marsham, a professor at the University of Leeds.
Across the southeastern United States, emergency workers are still struggling to provide relief after Helene, which killed at least 235 people.
– with AFP
