Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently called for prayers ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall on the state’s coast. Just after the damage of Hurricane Helene, Milton, which was still a Category 5 earlier this week, led to calls for evacuations across the state.
“Let’s prepare for the worst, and let’s pray that we get a weakening and hope for the least amount of damage as possible,” DeSantis said during a press briefing earlier this week. “But we must be prepared for a major, major impact to the west coast of Florida.”
Similarly, Pinellas County officials warned Milton could be the hurricane of a century. “There’s no other way to put this. Over the next few days, Tampa Bay is faced with the biggest hurricane it’s had for more than 100 years,” Pinellas County emergency management director Cathie Perkins noted. “We’ve seen the old black-and-white pictures, but we’re about to have the 3-D reality.”
The National Hurricane Center warned that the storm could be “one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida.” The organization said, “Damaging hurricane-force winds and a life-threatening storm surge with destructive waves are expected across portions of the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula through tonight. Milton is expected to grow in size and remain an extremely dangerous hurricane when it approaches the west coast of Florida on Wednesday.”
As the hurricane made landfall and passed through Florida as a Category 3 storm, approximately 3 million have been left without electricity. “As Hurricane Milton approaches Florida’s west coast, Duke Energy Florida is urging its customers to prepare for this catastrophic storm and a lengthy power restoration process that will result in extended outages,” according to Duke Energy, which supplies power to millions of Floridians.
Governor DeSantis issued an update on the storm, noting that it was “not the worst case scenario.” The Republican governor said, “Uh, we will better understand the extent of the damage as the day progresses and you have people that are out there assessing damage right now, first responders have been working all through the night to help people who were in distress. And what we can say is the storm was significant, but thankfully, this was not the worst case scenario.”
DeSantis continued, “The storm did weaken before landfall, and the storm surge, as initially reported, has not been as significant overall as what was observed for hurricane Helene. Right now, it looks like Sarasota County had the most significant storm surge, likely somewhere between eight to 10 feet. And remember, with Helene, we had 15 to 20 feet up in Taylor County, rescue missions have been underway throughout the night. State search and rescue teams report at least 48 individuals have been rescued as of 06 30 National Guard search and rescue teams have worked overnight and successfully executed rescues of families and pets on the West Coast and from the destruction of the tornadoes in East in the central and eastern parts of Florida, the guard continues to work into the morning and have 31 rescue aircraft operational, and hundreds of rescuers engaged in over 125 active missions in 26 different counties, over 6500 soldiers are deployed throughout the state.”
Featured image credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ron_DeSantis_(51327336483).jpg