Twelve days after Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern U.S., Floridians are experiencing a grim sense of déjà vu.
Over the past week, Hurricane Milton has been gaining strength over the bath-like waters of the western Gulf of Mexico. It’s currently oscillating between Category 4 and 5 speeds. The storm is set to make landfall by late Wednesday or early Thursday in Florida. High winds, catastrophic storm surge and torrential rains are expected to devastate communities along the Florida Gulf Coast, especially the dense city of Tampa.
“This is literally catastrophic,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said on CNN Monday evening. “I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever: If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”
As Milton looms, experts are concerned response efforts are struggling to keep up with compounding disasters, which are becoming more common with climate change.
Fingerprints of Climate Change: Yesterday, longtime meteorologist John Morales went on air for NBC 6 South Florida to give a real-time report on Milton’s status.
“It’s an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” Morales said. He paused, briefly choking up on air. “I apologize. … This is just horrific.”
It’s an apt description of what’s to come, according to forecasts. A Tuesday advisory from the National Hurricane Center says areas along the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, including Cancun, should expect “damaging hurricane-force winds and a life-threatening storm surge with destructive waves” today.
The storm is projected to slightly weaken but double in size by the time it reaches Florida on Wednesday evening. In some areas, storm surge could reach 15 feet—almost the height of an adult giraffe. Ocean temperatures are abnormally warm right now in the Gulf of Mexico, giving Milton a surplus of heat energy to suck up and fuel its path of destruction.
One of its unique characteristics is just how quickly it intensified. In a roughly 24-hour period, maximum wind speeds jumped by 90 miles per hour, marking one of the fastest intensification events ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. Research shows Atlantic hurricanes are more quickly strengthening from weaker storms into supercharged cyclones—and climate change is likely contributing. However, this “rapid intensification” is notoriously difficult to predict, an issue that I wrote about in July after Hurricane Beryl slammed into the Gulf Coast.
Fleeing Florida: Ahead of the hurricane, officials have issued mandatory evacuations in several counties across the Tampa Bay area. However, the devastation left by Hurricane Helene is adding an extra layer of complexity as residents attempt to flee. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said 800 members of the state National Guard have been deployed to help clear the heaps of debris from destroyed homes and buildings still left on the streets so they do not become projectiles when wind from Milton picks up.
Hurricane Helene also damaged or destroyed a slew of vehicles, forcing hundreds to seek rental cars as a means of escape, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
“My whole house is gone,” Vicki Donohue of St. Petersburg, Florida, told the Tampa Bay Times as she waited in line for her rental. “My car is gone, too. That’s why I’m here.”
Many of the residents in St. Petersburg who waited out Helene from their homes have decided to evacuate for Milton. However, it’s tough to go anywhere fast as heavy traffic clogs major highways and local roads in the state. A 2015 report found that Tampa Bay is one of the most vulnerable areas in the U.S. to storm surge flooding from a hurricane, largely because it is surrounded by shallow waters that can quickly overflow onto land.
Some locals are exploring the prospect of relocating altogether to try to avoid future threats of back-to-back superstorms.
“I don’t expect to stay in Florida” long term, Erika Nowlin, a Tampa-area resident, told The New York Times. “I don’t think I can go through that many hurricane seasons.”
Response Fallout: Federal emergency workers are currently being stretched thin as they scramble to respond to compounding disasters, from landslides in Vermont to the destructive aftermath of Helene. Experts fear there won’t be enough people to help pick up the pieces after Hurricane Milton passes.
As of Monday morning, less than 10 percent of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s personnel were available to respond to disasters, The New York Times reported. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the agency still has resources to respond to the upcoming hurricane, but warned that the department does not have enough money to get through the rest of the season, which lasts through the end of November.
The situation has brought increased attention to the broader issue of staffing shortages at FEMA. A report released last year by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office revealed that 35 percent of FEMA positions were unfilled. On Sunday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to commit to reconvening the House before the presidential election, which could prevent the allocation of additional disaster recovery funding.
In the face of these back-to-back hurricanes, conspiracy theories around FEMA funding and even intentional weather manipulation have gained traction. Some politicians, including former President Donald Trump, are claiming that President Joe Biden is funneling money intended for FEMA disaster support to undocumented immigrants, which the agency said is false.
Experts say that combing through conspiracy theories on social media could prevent people from seeing posts that could help them in a catastrophic event, including where to find evacuation centers or supplies.
More Top Climate News
The human death toll of hurricanes extends well beyond the storm itself, according to a new study. Researchers examined the cascading public health impacts of a hurricane—from increased stress to financial issues paying for healthcare—and found that tropical storms cause 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths over the 15 years following the event. The researchers found that Black Americans were more than three times as likely to die in the years after the storm than white Americans.
“Tropical cyclones and hurricanes are a much greater public health burden than we previously thought,” co-author Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told NPR.
In western North Carolina, many homeowners lack flood insurance and are struggling to pay out of pocket for damage from Hurricane Helene, Sally Ho reports for The Associated Press. Many people who live in this inland region, as well as in Georgia and Tennessee, were taken by surprise at the sheer extent of damage left by Helene. But experts say that inland flooding is set to get worse as climate change accelerates, which I wrote about last week. As a result, some experts are advocating that inland homeowners seek greater coverage in the face of flooding.
The Biden administration announced on Tuesday a 10-year deadline for water utilities across the U.S. to replace lead pipes. The requirement aims to prevent lead poisoning, which can cause brain impairment, particularly in children.
“This rule is historic. It’s a game changer,” Mona Hanna, associate dean at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine, told The New York Times. “We’ve been living too long on our great-grandparents’ infrastructure.”
New research shows that migrating seabirds are carrying forever chemicals called PFAS into the Arctic. Scientists traced the geographic origins of the PFAS within small gulls known as black-legged kittiwakes and found that they are picking up the highest levels of the chemicals in polluted southern waters, likely by eating contaminated fish, William von Herff reports for Hakai.
For the first time in more than 140 years, the United Kingdom does not have any operational coal-fired power plants, John Timmer reports for Ars Technica. The UK was the first country to harness coal power in the 19th century. But at the end of September, the sovereign state became one of the first governments to phase it out completely, shutting down its last coal power plant. Burning coal releases vast amounts of carbon emissions, so the move is seen as a major climate win.
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Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.
She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
