Hurricane Milton has reached Florida as a Category 3 storm and is on track to create billions of dollars in damages.
According to combined media hurricane reporting, this is the first major hurricane to strike Florida’s Tampa Bay since 1921. The Tampa Bay metro area includes three major cities – Clearwater, St. Petersburg and Tampa – and a population of more than three million people. Residents seeking to evacuate the area faced heavy traffic and many gas stations that were sold out of fuel. Mandatory evacuations were declared for Pinellas and Pasco Counties’ zones A, B and C and for all mobile and manufactured homes, while Hillsborough County has ordered evacuations for residents in zones A and B and all mobile and manufactured homes.
As of roughly 3:00 p.m. EDT, power outages began to sweep across the region. Utility providers TECO and Duke Energy are warning customers that they could be without power for several days, with Duke adding the “more than a million outages” could occur if the storm sweeps through Tampa Bay and Orlando.
Wall Street analysts are predicting Hurricane Milton could leave behind anywhere from $50 billion to $175 billion in damage. Mark Friedlander, director of corporate communications with the Insurance Information Institute, pointed out that only about 20% of Florida homeowners carry flood insurance – traditional homeowner policies do not cover flooding.
Hurricane Milton comes two weeks after Hurricane Helene hit the Southeast, and an estimate from Moody’s stated the damage from that storm could result in roughly $11 billion in insured losses nationally.
Photo: Hurricane Milton as seen from space, courtesy NASA Johnson / Flickr Creative Commons
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