Battered by Helene and now bracing for Milton

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Hundreds of thousands of people fled Florida’s Gulf Coast on Tuesday, packing up belongings and draining gas stations as they moved out of the path of Hurricane Milton, in what could be one of the largest evacuations in state history.

The monster storm was forecast on Wednesday to slam into the Tampa Bay region, a metropolitan area of about 3 million people that hasn’t taken a direct hit from a hurricane in more than a century. The storm was then expected to wallop the Orlando area as it cut across the Florida Peninsula.

Milton was bearing down on Florida as some communities in the state were still littered with mountains of debris from Helene, which hit less than two weeks ago and also caused deadly floods in southern Appalachia.

About 5.5 million Floridians live in areas that were under mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders in at least 11 counties along the state’s Gulf Coast, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Many of them live in coastal and low-lying areas of Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country, with about 3.5 million residents. Others are farther south, on barrier islands and in coastal towns that were hit by Hurricane Ian in 2022.

State officials said they were expecting the largest evacuation since Hurricane Irma in 2017 prompted the biggest hurricane evacuation in Florida history.

Milton, a Category 4 hurricane as of Tuesday afternoon, was heading toward Florida with sustained wind speeds of 155 mph, and heavy rain that was threatening to cause “catastrophic” flooding, according to the National Weather Service.

Gov. Ron DeSantis cautioned residents across Florida on Tuesday afternoon that the danger was not just limited to the west coast of the state. There will be “significant impacts all across that state,” he said, as the storm system moves to interior parts of Florida and eventually out to the Atlantic Ocean.

About 8,000 National Guard troops will be activated in what is likely to be the largest mobilization in state history, DeSantis said.

Officials advised people who were under evacuation orders to move at least a few miles inland to avoid the storm surge. Hillsborough County officials urged residents to get to a safe place by 7 a.m. Wednesday.

“Don’t panic,” the county’s emergency management director, Timothy Dudley Jr., said at a news conference on Tuesday. “You have time, get somewhere safe, and we’ll see you on the other end.”

Still, highways in western Central Florida slowed to a crawl on Monday before they eventually cleared by 1 a.m. Tuesday, state officials said. By Tuesday afternoon, some were jammed once again.

Erin Roth, 43, said she had decided to leave her home in Seminole, Florida, in the Tampa Bay area, even though it is not in a mandatory evacuation zone. She wanted to be sure her 15-year-old daughter and two dogs would be safe.

“I was panicked,” she said. “I just thought we needed to go.”

The only rooms her family could find were in Atlanta. They left at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, and eight hours later — about twice the time the trip would usually take — they had just made it across the state line to Valdosta, Georgia.

President Joe Biden postponed a diplomatic trip to Germany and Angola to oversee his administration’s response to Milton.

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