The question was never whether Hurricane Milton was going to be a disaster, but whether it was going to be a major disaster or a catastrophic one.
Fortunately for Tampa, it was the former.
“The potentiality of this hurricane was extraordinarily high,” said Guelph storm chaser and meteorologist Mark Robinson from Ybor City, a neighbourhood in Tampa. “When we started looking at this storm, one of the things we were seeing was that it was going straight into Tampa Bay, or even just a little bit north of Tampa Bay. If it did that, it was going to be pushing 15 feet of storm surge into the bay.”
Meaning the water would have been chest high.
“Those areas could have gone under tremendous amounts of water if it had come straight through,” he said of Tampa and St. Petersburg. “(This) beautiful neighbourhood would have been absolutely wrecked. And this is just one small part of it. When you look at the whole, there’s huge neighbourhoods that could have easily gone underwater.”
With about two hours of sleep, Robinson stood in the street of a not-too-wrecked neighbourhood after a night of harrowing winds, water surges and power outages.
Hurricane Milton hit landfall Wednesday night near Siesta Key in Sarasota County, where Robinson was hunkered down in a parking garage livestreaming the storm for The Weather Network.
It was the second major hurricane he’s covered in two weeks, the last being Hurricane Helene, brought destruction and fatalities across six states including Florida.
The difference between the two, he said, is that while Helene brought in with it six feet of surge, it “never really had the potential to be hugely destructive, because it was going into an area that wasn’t very populated.”
“This one was coming at a populated area, so no matter what, it was going to hit an urban area. No matter what, it was going to be a major disaster.”
It also came in so quickly, he said, that there was little time to figure out what the storm was actually going to do.
“It was a terrifying prospect, but we knew that if it went just a bit south, you weren’t going to get that surge, but it was still going to be a devastating storm.
“No matter what, it was going to do damage, it was going to make a mess of the West Coast of Florida,” he said. “It was the best of a bad situation. Tampa got very, very lucky.”
The damage is broad, he said, and still being assessed. It’s unclear so far which areas were hit the hardest. At least 12 deaths have been confirmed; millions lost power.
“One of the things we’re seeing is power loss, trees down, damage everywhere. Storm surge issues. It brought boats onshore. And up here in Tampa, what they got was the 1,000 year flood from the rain and not from the storm surge,” he said.
He said it will take some time to assess the overall damage, but each area was hit with different things: The East side was hit with tornadoes, Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte and Sarasota got hit with a storm surge, Tampa and Orlando with wind and rain.
At the site of the crane collapse in St Petersburg. @weathernetwork #Milton pic.twitter.com/4qHcoCCafb
— Mark Robinson (@StormhunterTWN) October 10, 2024
“So It’s going to take a while to figure it all out and see exactly who got hit the hardest by this and where the major damage areas are.”
Milton was also a “prolific producer of tornadoes” that contributed to fatalities, he said.
“A friend of mine was in West Palm Beach… his wife and daughter were actually hiding in a closet as the tornado went a block away from their house,” he said. “They’re all ok, but it did wreck a part of their neighbourhood.”
While tornadoes are common occurrences with hurricanes, he said this number of them is unusual, though they’re not sure what caused so many this time around.
“It’s something we’ll have to look into. Tornado researches will be really interested in this,” he said.
While he was in the parking garage he noticed a car trapped by the surge.
“There was a car down the street and the surge came in so fast, the car got swamped.”
They weren’t sure if someone was in it, so he waded through the water through the screaming winds with his dry suit and helmet, pulling open the door – but fortunately, there was no one there.
“And then I had to get back out of the surge and out of the flying debris,” he said. “That was a bit more risk than I would usually take, but if somebody is in trouble, I want to make sure that we’re there to help out.”
