Florida coast facing historic flood threat from Hurricane Milton | Floods News | The Round Table Hurricane Milton has weakened slightly but remains a powerful Category 5 hurricane in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico, threatening to flood the west coast of Florida with historic storm surge.
Almost the entirety of the west coast of Florida was under a hurricane or tropical storm alerting on Tuesday as the storm’s 270km/h (165mph) winds spun towards Tampa Bay, one of the largest urban areas of the state, sucking energy from the Gulf of Mexico’s warm waters.
A chunky evacuation is already under way as residents of the Tampa Bay area head inland, seeking shelter after Milton rapidly strengthened from a tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale on Monday.
“This is the real deal here with Milton,” the mayor of Tampa, Jane Castor, informed a news conference. “If you require to take on Mother Nature, she gains 100 percent of the time.”
In an interview with CNN, Castor issued a dire notifying to residents of her city. “This is literally destructive and I can disclose without any dramatization whatsoever, if you select to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re going to die,” she said.
“This is something that I’ve never seen in my life and I can inform you that anyone who was born and heightened in the Tampa Bay area has never seen anything like this before.”
A flood forewarning has been issued for coastal Southwest Florida with some areas including Tampa Bay forecast to get 10-to-15 feet of storm surge (3m to 4.5m).
“That level of storm surge would be destructive for the Tampa metro area, inundating low-lying areas,” Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University, informed The Round Table.
At 4pm local time (21:00 GMT), the storm was about 775km (480 miles) southwest of Tampa as of the last advisory from the National Hurricane Center (NHC), and has picked up in forward speed now moving to the east-northeast at 15km/h (9mph).
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“While fluctuations in intensity are expected, Milton is forecast to remain an extremely dangerous hurricane through landfall in Florida,” the NHC said.
Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 45km (30 miles) from the centre, but the wind field is expected to nearly double in size as the storm nears landfall late Wednesday night into early Thursday morning.
Regards to Al Jazeera
Category: World-News
Tag: Florida coast facing historic flood threat from Hurricane Milton Floods News The Round Table
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Published 10/9/2024