‘Evacuate now’ Biden tells those in Hurricane Milton’s path

US President Joe Biden urged those who have been ordered to leave before Hurricane Milton makes landfall in Florida to “evacuate now”, saying it was a matter of life and death.

“This could be the worst storm to hit Florida in over a century, and God-willing it won’t be, but it’s looking like that right now,” Biden said.

Biden added that he has approved pre-landfall emergency declarations in Florida and is calling on airlines to accommodate evacuations and not engage in price-gouging.

Hurricane Milton was expected to enlarge on Wednesday as it grinded past Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula en route to Florida’s Gulf Coast, where more than 1 million people were ordered to evacuate before the monster storm arrived.

Florida’s densely populated west coast, still reeling from the devastating Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago, braced for landfall in the Tampa Bay area on Thursday.

If the hurricane drives directly up the bay, it will mark the first time that has occurred since 1921, when the now-sprawling Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area was a relative backwater.

“Milton has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida,” the US National Hurricane Center said.

The centre forecast storm surges of 3 to 4.5 metres along a stretch of coastline north and south of Tampa Bay, setting up the likelihood that seawater could swamp low-lying areas. Forecasts of 127 to 254 mm or more of rainfall threatened flash flooding farther inland.

Some of the area’s 3 million residents rushed to dispose of mounds of debris left by Helene before heeding the evacuation orders.

Volunteers in Miami fill sandbags as residents prepare for the arrival of Hurricane Milton in Florida on 7 October.
Photo: GIORGIO VIERA / AFP

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said on Tuesday the state would activate 8000 National Guard members and is positioning truckloads of supplies and equipment near the area where the storm is expected to make landfall.

“Now is the time to execute your plan … but that time is running out,” he said during a press conference, urging residents to heed warnings from forecasters and local evacuation orders.

State ferryboat operator Ken Wood, 58, spent Tuesday morning racing to pack up his truck in the Gulf city of Dunedin about 39 km west of Tampa, to avoid the brunt of the storm with Andy, his 16-year-old cat.

“Me and Andy are headed north this time and we’ll outrun this thing,” he said.

Two weeks ago, Wood defied evacuation orders and hunkered down in his house during Helene. Wood described it as one of the most harrowing experiences in his life as the house was battered by the storm.

“We won’t make the same mistake again. We’re not staying here.”

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. At least six other coastal counties ordered evacuations including Hillsborough County, which includes the city of Tampa.

Pinellas County residents fill sandbags at John Chestnut Park in Palm Harbor, Florida.
Photo: AFP / Bryan R. Smith

Motorists waited to fill their tanks in lines snaking around gas stations, only to find that some were out of fuel, according to local media and social-media posts.

By early Tuesday, bumper-to-bumper traffic choked roads leading out of Tampa, with cars and trucks inching northbound and eastbound toward the relative safety of the interior, the Tampa Bay Times and other media reported.

Catastrophic damage expected

With maximum sustained winds of 250 kph, Milton was downgraded from a category 5 to a category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, according to the US National Hurricane Center’s latest advisory on Tuesday local time.

While fluctuations in intensity are expected, Milton is forecast to remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida, according to the hurricane centre. That means catastrophic damage will occur, including power outages expected to last days.

Fed by warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic Ocean, as it surged from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane – the most powerful category – in less than 24 hours.

Its path from west to east was also highly unusual, as Gulf hurricanes typically form in the Caribbean Sea and make landfall after travelling west and turning north.

“It is exceedingly rare for a hurricane to form in the western Gulf, track eastward, and make landfall on the western coast of Florida,” said Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University. “This has big implications since the track of the storm plays a role in determining where the storm surge will be the largest.”

Milton is expected to grow in size before making landfall on Wednesday, putting hundreds of miles of coastline within the storm-surge danger zone, said Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center. The area placed under hurricane warning is home to more than 9.3 million residents.

Milton was likely to remain a hurricane for its entire journey across the Florida peninsula, Rhome told a Tuesday news briefing.

As of 10am ET on Tuesday (3am Wednesday NZT), the eye of the storm was 105 km north-northeast of Progreso, a Mexican port near the Yucatan state capital of Merida, and 840 km southwest of Tampa, moving east at 15 kph.

The area is home to the picturesque colonial-era city of Merida, population 1.2 million and Maya ruins popular with tourists.

Joaquin Diaz Mena, the governor of Yucatan state, said much of the damage reported so far had been minor. Thousands of utility customers lost power, and more than a thousand residents around Rio Lagartos – famed for its pink waters and flamingos evacuated from the coast.

“We will be watching for damages in the coming hours”, he said. “Right now, according to the hurricane’s trajectory we can estimate that the danger for Yucatan is already passing.”

Relief efforts remain ongoing throughout much of the US Southeast in the wake of Helene, a category 4 hurricane that made landfall in Florida on 26 September, killed more than 200 people and caused billions of dollars in damage across six states. Asheville and other mountain communities of western North Carolina, hundreds of miles inland, were particularly hard-hit.

– Reuters