from zoom.earth
I’ve has a bit of time to get my thoughts together on Hurricane Milton now that a few days have passed since it made landfall in SW Florida near the beautiful Siesta Key area on October 9. My predominant feeling is gratitude. My family and I came through this with minor damage and didn’t lose power.
But the flip side of that was a week or so of high anxiety and fear, especially as Milton grew into a monster storm, literally overnight. I’m a native Floridian and I live inland in an area where people on the coast evacuate to, so I normally take these things in stride. However, similar to Hurricane Irma, which hit us in 2017, this one felt different. And it was.
I confess I broke Denis Phillips’ Rule #7 (don’t freak out) more than once last week (everyone in the Tampa Bay area knows what Rule #7 is and I’m sure I’m not the only one who broke it). 😥 It was a very tense and scary experience.
A brief bio of Milton
I think the last time a recorded hurricane took a track from west to east across the Gulf of Mexico was in the 1800s. This already makes Milton an anomaly but what happened next put it in the record books.
Milton started as a storm in the Pacific, worked its way across Mexico, and emerged on October 5 as a disorganized system in the Bay of Campeche, near the Yucatan Peninsula. Proto-Milton loitered in the Bay for a couple of days while Florida watched and waited to see if it would dissipate or turn into something we needed to worry about. Will it? Won’t it? Denis Phillips (my got-to local meteorologist mentioned above) refers to this as being stalked by a turtle 🐢 , which is apt.
Two days later, we had our answer. It will and it did. The disorganized blob of storm clouds quickly morphed into a tropical depression, then a tropical storm, and finally on October 6, it was Hurricane Milton (Category 1). Milton went through a record-breaking intensification cycle overnight and emerged on October 7 as a monster Category 5 storm.
Categories and climate change
For those not familiar with hurricane categories, they are set using the Saffir Simpson scale (below). Cat 5 is as bad as it can get. But Milton wasn’t done yet. On October 8, it reached peak sustained wind speeds of 180 mph and a minimum central pressure of 897 mbar (the lower the pressure, the more powerful the storm – below 900 is rare and extremely bad). If there was such a thing as a Cat 6, it would have hit that too. I’ll be honest – this had me scared and at points, semi-terrified (again, there went Rule #7 out the window).
Scientists believe that climate change contributed to Milton’s rapid intensification, which was fueled by record-breaking water temperatures in the Gulf.
From The Scientific American:
An analysis by the research and communication nonprofit Climate Central found that the water temperatures in Milton’s path were between 400 and 800 times more likely to occur because of global warming. In general, researchers have found that hurricanes are growing stronger and intensifying faster as the climate warms. That means a greater proportion of tropical cyclones are likely to spin up into monster storms like Milton in the coming decades.
The tl;dr is that we should expect things like this to happen more often. Yet my state gov is fully into climate change denial and we see how that’s working for us so far.
Tornadoes
Hurricanes often spawn tornadoes in the outer “feeder bands” of the storm and in what’s colloquially known as the “dirty side” of the storm and Milton was no different. What was different and set yet another record was the number of tornado warnings and confirmed sightings as well as the size and power of the tornadoes.
Usually, tornadoes here are small funnels that form briefly, sometimes touch down for a few minutes, and then disappear. Not so this time.
Most of Florida was under a tornado watch for hours. My weather radio blared seemingly constantly with warnings and the weather reports were frankly terrifying. Some of the tornadoes looked like something out of the Midwest or a movie. Huge wedge tornadoes popped up on the east coast and several powerful ones touched down in central Florida, some of them staying on the ground for extended periods and traveling miles.
This was truly terrifying and even more so since almost no one here has a basement. I had prepared an interior closet for me and my family (including those who evacuated here) just in case and I’m so glad we didn’t have to use it.
Saved by shear
The only thing that gave us hope of avoiding a strong Cat 4 or 5 hitting Florida was another weather system close to the coast that was forecast to create wind shear, thus weakening Milton. But let me be clear: when you have a 180 mph storm, “weakening” is a relative term. Still, it was possible to go from worst-case catastrophic scenario to “merely” something very very bad.
The catch was that Milton wasn’t forecast to encounter this shear until about 12 hours before landfall. For people who didn’t evacuate, by the time we figured out if things would work as forecast, it would be too late to evacuate. Which brings up another problem.
Evacuation, population, and intrusion
Florida has other problems that create logistical difficulties with preparing for events like Milton, as well as dealing with the aftermath. We’ve had unregulated and massive population growth for years, which accelerated during and after the pandemic. We also have a large population of seniors, many of whom live in manufactured or mobile homes, which puts them an increased risk and a need for accessible shelter.
For years—decades actually—we’ve allowed unbridled development, intruding on natural areas that served as waterways and natural flood control and we’ve aggressively built in low-lying areas prone to flooding. We’ve created huge urban areas with massive population density on our coasts, leaving millions of people exposed to the most serious impacts of these storms.
So now comes a storm like Milton (and others before it like Irma) that threatens large swaths of these urban areas and require massive evacuations. With Milton, that was about 5 million people in mandatory evacuation zones. Those zones are the ones subject to powerful and deadly storm surges. These surges are the ones that wipe houses off of foundations and are generally considered unsurvivable.
There’s a reason why we have the saying “Hide from the wind; run from the water.
The other problem? We’re a peninsula with only a handful of major roads heading north and similar difficulties heading east-west, depending on which coast is under threat. Sometimes, like with Irma, it’s both coasts. Gridlock is a guarantee when you push millions of people on the road in a short period of time.
The result is that people who want to leave the area must make evacuation decisions and arrangements days before the storm—and in this case, even with that, people were stuck in traffic for hours and hours. Most people can’t leave home 2 or 3 or 4 days before the storm hits, and even if they could, we often don’t know where the storm will hit to be sure of which areas in the state may be a safe location or not.
With Irma, that storm looked likely to hit South Florida. I had family from Miami evacuate here where I live in the middle of the state. The path changed and guess where the eye of the storm ended up? Yep, right here.
Tropical storm force winds arrive hours before landfall, leaving it a precarious situation to evacuate last-minute and risk being stuck on the road. All of this leaves no margin of error in terms of evacuation.
Add to that the reports of people required to be at work on the east coast while this rolled in at a time when the active and confirmed tornadoes were touching down. People elsewhere in the state face similar challenges with evacuation and more often than one might think, must choose between their job and their safety. Here, in the direct path of the storm, local grocery stores and some big box retailers didn’t close until late afternoon/early evening the day before landfall and they weren’t the only ones by far still open. This leaves employees with almost no time to leave the area.
I will say that the shelter situation has improved over the years with some designated for people with special needs and physical limitations and some that are pet-friendly. Transportation is also provided for people who need it. But those shelters fill up quickly and are intended to be more of a “last resort” thing if you have nowhere else better to go.
Outcome and aftermath
I feel like overall as a state, we were lucky. I say that with care because I recognize that many of my fellow Floridians aren’t feeling very lucky right now. People lost lives, homes, and treasured possessions or face massive repairs and damage and I would never want to minimize that. But man, it could have been so, so much worse.
Thank goodness for that shear. Milton made landfall several hours before it was forecast as a Category 3 with sustained winds of 120mph. Terrible. But compared to 180mph? That would have been unimaginable.
I feel like my little city once again (mostly) dodged a bullet. The eye passed over us, but thanks to that shear, the southern half of the storm was basically ripped away, leaving all of the worst weather to the north of me. I was very lucky and managed to be between the eyewall to the south of me and the nasty winds and rain that stretched out to the north. Just those few miles either direction make a huge difference.
For those in that swath of heavy rain and wind, people were battered for hours with high winds and a deluge of rain. Flash floods were a huge problem and many people in my area, even now several days after the storm, are dealing with extensive flooding. One of my family member’s office building had several feet of standing water in it and remains flooded. There are neighborhoods where people can’t get in or out due to flooding. And this is inland. On the coast, it’s worse. In St. Pete, they got the storm surge from the Gulf and a whopping ~19 inches of rain, all in less than a single day.
With all of this wind and rain comes massive power outages. After Milton finally left the state (still unbelievably maintaining a Cat 1 strength well out into the Atlantic), almost 4 million Floridians were without electricity. Linemen have been working hard, as they always do, to restore power. They are among the unsung heroes in these things, leaving their family for weeks at a time and working in terrible conditions to restore power.
What’s next?
Hopefully nothing. The hurricane season doesn’t technically end until November 30 so we still have about 6 weeks left to go. November storms are rare but with climate change, that may change too.
Right now, there’s a little area, Invest 94, that we’re watching and I suspect many people like me are crossing their fingers after 2 back-to-back monster hurricanes. It’s currently well out in the Atlantic and I fervently hope it stays far away from land.
We also have an insurance crisis in our state that’s a whole topic in itself and something that our governor and state government doesn’t seem very interested in addressing. Helene and Milton are only going to exacerbate things.
Aside from that, I don’t know what we can do to combat these issues or if it’s even too late and the damage has been done. For most of us, all we can do is prepare as best as we can for whatever may come.
#Florida #DenisPhillips #tropicalweather #HurricaneMilton #Rule7 #tornadoes #Climatechange #news #weather #hurricane #hurricanes
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