Hurricane Milton is approaching Florida's west coast as a massive Category 5 storm, with massive traffic jams and fuel shortages on land as officials ordered more than a million people to evacuate before winds hit the Tampa Bay area.
Milton, which strengthened on Monday into one of the most intense Atlantic hurricanes on record, is forecast to make landfall late Wednesday or early Thursday, threatening a section of Florida's densely populated west coast that is still recovering from the devastating Hurricane Helena that struck a short time ago of two weeks.
A direct hit by a hurricane in that bay would be the first since 1921, when the area around Tampa was relatively uninhabited, while now more than three million people live there.
US President Joseph Biden asked Florida residents to leave, warning that Milton's impact could be the worst natural disaster to hit the US state in a hundred years.
Biden added that evacuation for those ordered to leave immediately is a matter of life and death.
Meteorologists predict Milton's wind field will increase, increasing the risk of storm surge on hundreds of kilometers of coastline. The hurricane center reported waves of three to 4,5 meters north and south of Tampa Bay, in addition to fierce winds and the risk of inland flooding from intense rainfall.
The US National Hurricane Center on Tuesday upgraded Milton to a Category 5 hurricane, the highest level on the five-point Saffir-Simpson scale, as maximum winds reached 270 kilometers per hour.
Underscoring the storm's threat, Biden postponed a trip to Germany and Angola to oversee storm preparations and response, the White House said.
More than a dozen coastal counties in Florida have issued mandatory evacuation orders.
As congestion was reported on the roads, drivers waited to fill up their tanks in queues snaking around petrol pumps, only to find that some had run out of fuel.
About 17 percent of Florida's nearly 8.000 gas stations were out of gas late Tuesday, according to data from market tracking company GasBuddy.
Milton is forecast to cross central Florida and dump 46 inches of rain as it moves toward the Atlantic Ocean, according to the National Hurricane Center. That path would largely spare other states devastated by Helen, a hurricane that killed at least 230 people on its path from Florida to the Carolinas.
Successive hurricanes that rapidly intensify into powerful storms have become more common as climate change worsens the conditions that allow them to form.
Experts warn that there are no recent examples of how catastrophic a Milton strike could be, since even the notorious hurricanes Andrew, Harvey and Katrina did not actually directly hit the major metropolitan area.
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