United States: Rain continued to pour, and winds started to increase early Wednesday in Tampa Bay as Hurricane Milton barreled toward a disastrous landfall on the west coast of Florida, where authorities issued dire evacuation orders for people to move as far as 100 miles away from the shoreline to avoid being engulfed by the storm’s flooding.
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Currently, the population of the Tampa Bay area has been breached by 3.3 million individuals who have not directly experienced hurricane impact for over a century.
Milton oscillated between categories 4 and 5 as it neared; still, as per the classifications, the NHC said it would remain a major and very dangerous storm when landfall occurred late Wednesday, AP News reported.
According to Cathie Perkins, emergency management director in Pinellas County, which is located on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay, “This is it, folks,” and, “Those of you who were punched during Hurricane Helene, this is going to be a knockout. You need to get out, and you need to get out now.”
Disaster is awaiting
The well-known Sunshine Skyway Bridge over the mouth of Tampa Bay whose traffic is often preempted by strong winds – has been reported to have shut down around mid-morning.
Other larger bridges were also to be shut down, according to Perkins.
The normally crowded interstate leading into downtown Tampa was largely empty early on Wednesday.
Not many vehicles were on side streets. Gasoline consumers who wanted to fill their tanks were challenged to locate stations that were not shut down, let alone barricaded.
Some had wrapped their fuel pumps in plastic to prevent the nozzles from swinging crazily in hurricane conditions, AP News reported.
What more have the officials stated?
At a news conference held at Tallahassee, where Gov. Ron DeSantis cited that the deployment includes 9,000 National Guard personnel from Florida and other states, more than 50,000 utility workers from as far as California, and highway patrol cars with their sirens on to lead gasoline tankers to ensure supplies enough to enable people to fill up their tanks before evacuating the state.
Milton was located about 190 miles southwest of Tampa last week Wednesday morning and was a major category four hurricane, the hurricane center said, with maximum wind speeds of 145 mph.
