Category five Hurricane Milton closes in on Florida

Thousands are evacuating as Category 5 storm, Hurricane Milton, barrels toward the Florida coastline, threatening towering storm surges and extreme flooding.

Traffic was heavy on Tuesday as people fled the Tampa area, while crews along the coast hurried to clear Helene’s debris so that Milton doesn’t turn it into dangerous projectiles.

Hurricane Milton had previously weakened to a Category 4 storm, but its wind speeds have increased once again past the Category 5 threshold, according to the US National Hurricane Centre.

The storm remained offshore on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula early on Tuesday, knocking down power lines, light poles and trees near the coast, and destroying some small thatched-roof structures. according to Yucatán Governor, Joaquín Díaz Mena.

Milton is forecast to cross central Florida, bringing as much as 46 centimetres of rainfall in its path as it heads towards the Atlantic Ocean.

Tampa Bay’s National Weather Service says storm surges could reach up to roughly three metres high when the storm makes landfall on Florida’s central Gulf coast late on Wednesday.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has warned the west cost of Florida “must be prepared for major, major impact”, while President Joe Biden warned that Milton “could be one of the worst storms in 100 years to hit Florida.”

President Biden has approved an emergency declaration for Florida, and the White House announced Tuesday that he would postpone a trip to Germany and Angola to monitor the storm.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has almost 900 staff members in the region and has stocked two staging areas with 20 million meals and 40 million litres of water, the White House said.

Clean up continues after Hurricane Helene

Hurricane Milton comes less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene caused widespread devastation to the US east coast, killing at least 225 people.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has vowed to continue around-the-clock efforts to pick up debris from Helene until it’s no longer safe to do so as Hurricane Milton approaches.

In a Tuesday afternoon briefing in Ocala, the governor said Florida Department of Transportation crews had just removed more than 1,300 truckloads of debris in just over 48 hours, which DeSantis called “a huge, huge amount.”

The clean up effort is key to sparing communities more damage, DeSantis said.

“We’ve made a huge dent in this,” he said. “The more debris we can get picked up, the less damage that’s going to happen, whether that’s floating into the Gulf of Mexico, whether it’s projectiles that go into other buildings.”

The arrival of back-to-back hurricanes that rapidly intensified into mighty storms comes as climate change exacerbates conditions that are allowing them to thrive in warming waters.

Milton is the 13th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which started 1 June.