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Hurricane Milton is ploughing across Florida after slamming into the state’s western coast on Wednesday, bringing life-threatening flooding and leaving millions without power.
The cyclone made landfall near Siesta Key in Sarasota County as a category three storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds of 120mph, the US National Hurricane Center said. It is forecast to remain at hurricane strength as it moves across central Florida on Thursday towards the Atlantic Ocean.
The NHC warned that the storm would bring “devastating rains and damaging winds”, with “life-threatening” gusts, tornadoes and storm surges of up to 13ft that could inundate urban areas with flash flooding.
“Now is the time to shelter in place,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis wrote on social media platform X late on Wednesday. “Search and rescue efforts will be well under way to save lives before dawn, and they will continue for as long as it takes.”
More than 2.8mn homes and businesses were without power in Florida late on Wednesday night, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks utility reports across the US. Storm surge warnings were in effect in parts of Florida’s west coast including Tampa Bay, which avoided a direct hit, and from the state’s central east coast to southern Georgia.
Milton is the second major hurricane to hit the US in a fortnight. It comes after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across several south-eastern states, killing more than 225 people and destroying roads across western North Carolina.
The head of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, Deanne Criswell, warned on Wednesday that Milton would be a “deadly and catastrophic storm” bringing “massive storm surge, high winds and severe flooding” to Florida.
Hurricane Milton could trigger insurance losses of up to $60bn, with analysts warning the US’s 2024 hurricane season will “dent” insurers’ profitability.
Credit rating agency Morningstar DBRS warned that accumulation of losses over the 2024 hurricane season, which runs until the end of November, would “likely make a dent in insurers’ profitability”, particularly for those with “significant exposures to personal lines in Florida”.
While south-east Florida has long been seen as a high-risk area for hurricanes, insurers considered the northern part of the state as a more attractive place to write policies, said Oscar Seikaly, chief executive of NSI Insurance, a Miami-based group.
“Insurers have been balancing their business by writing lots of policies up north, which historically was pretty safe — until recently,” he said.
Seikaly added the potential damage in the area, where many houses are not built to withstand major storm events, could be severe. “There are still frame houses and those are the ones that fly if you have a tropical storm,” he said.
Before Milton made landfall, DeSantis said 6,000 members of the Florida National Guard and 3,000 from other states were standing ready to respond to its aftermath.
“This is the largest Florida National Guard search and rescue mobilisation in the entire history of the state of Florida,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday criticised Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for leading an “onslaught of lies” about the US government’s response to the storm.
Trump has sought to politicise both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton by accusing the Biden administration of not doing enough to help communities hit by the storms. He has also spread false information about the amount of financial aid available to people fleeing disaster areas.
“For the last few weeks, there’s been a reckless, irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies that are disturbing people,” said Biden. “It’s undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been taken and will continue to be taken. It’s harmful to those who need help the most.”
In the Tampa Bay area, officials had sent text messages and called people to warn them of the dangers of failing to evacuate their homes. In Pinellas County, which sits on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay, officials warned people to “get out now”.
An independent group of climate scientists said human-caused climate change had boosted Hurricane Helene’s devastating rainfall by about 10 per cent and intensified its winds by about 11 per cent.
Global warming from the burning of fossil fuels had made the high sea temperatures that fuelled the storm 200 to 500 times more likely, the World Weather Attribution group found in a new report.
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