By Julio-Cesar Chavez and Octavio Jones
TAMPA (Reuters) -Hurricane Milton was expected to expand in size on Tuesday as it chugged past Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula en route to Florida’s battered 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 Wednesday.
A direct hit on the bay would be the first 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 U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The center forecast storm surges of 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 meters) along a stretch of coastline north and south of Tampa Bay, likely swamping low-lying areas. Forecasts of five to 10 inches (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.
Musician John O’Leary, 38, was securing his Tampa townhouse and packing for a road trip with his girlfriend to New Port Richey, about 40 miles (64 km) north. He was worried about his baby grand piano, which he had to leave behind.
They plan to stay with friends who have a home on high ground but will keep an eye on the storm’s path and may head farther north.
“This storm is so strong, big, it’s unreal,” he said. “We’re in survival mode.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said on Tuesday the state would activate 8,000 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.
At Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, home of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team, thousands of green cots were set up ahead of the storm’s arrival.
U.S. President Joe Biden postponed on Tuesday his Oct. 10-15 trip to Germany and Angola to oversee preparations for Milton and the response following the hurricane, the White House said.
Biden urged those who have been ordered to leave before Milton makes landfall in Florida to evacuate immediately, saying it was a matter of life and death.
FLEEING THE STORM
State ferryboat operator Ken Wood, 58, spent Tuesday morning racing to pack up his truck in the Gulf city of Dunedin about 24 miles (39 km) west of Tampa so he could avoid the brunt of the storm with Andy, his 16-year-old cat.
Two weeks ago, Wood defied evacuation orders and hunkered down in his house during Helene, a night he described as one of the most harrowing experiences of his life.
“We won’t make the same mistake again,” he said.
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 Tampa’s Hillsborough County.
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, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
Vanessa Vazquez, a 52-year-old software engineer in St. Petersburg, filled her gas tank in case she decides to flee ahead of the storm’s arrival but had not decided yet.
“It does scare us, to be honest,” she said. “It has the potential to get really crazy.”
She said she is worried about the trees around her house, because rain from Helene had softened the ground.
CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE EXPECTED
With maximum sustained winds of 150 mph (241 kph), Milton was downgraded from a category 5 to a category 4 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center’s latest advisory on Tuesday.
While fluctuations in intensity are expected, Milton is forecast to remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida, causing catastrophic damage and 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 – in less than 24 hours.
Its path from west to east was highly unusual, as Gulf hurricanes typically form in the Caribbean Sea and make landfall after traveling west and turning north.
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 warnings 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 Monday news briefing.
As of 11 a.m. ET, the storm was 130 miles (209 km) northeast of Progreso, a Mexican port near the Yucatan state capital of Merida, and 520 miles (837 km) southwest of Tampa, according to the hurricane center. The area affected by the storm’s winds was expected to double in size by the time it makes landfall on Wednesday in Florida, the center said.
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.
Relief efforts remain ongoing throughout much of the U.S. Southeast in the wake of Helene, a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, killed more than 200 people across six states and caused billions of dollars in damage.
Asheville and other mountain communities of western North Carolina, hundreds of miles inland, were particularly hard-hit.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta and Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Additional reporting by Brad Brooks, Katharine Jackson, Sarah Moreland, Daksh Grover and Doina Chiacu; Writing by Daniel Trotta and Joseph Ax; Editing by Frank McGurty and Rod Nickel)
