by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:
A 15 foot tall wall of water is about to slam directly into a major American city. More than 3 million people live in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, and hundreds of thousands of them are very tightly concentrated along the coast. Most of them are attempting to evacuate, but there are apparently large numbers of local residents that are choosing not to do so. This is very foolish, because their homes are about to be underwater. Sadly, many of those that are trying to evacuate are stuck in extremely long traffic jams. Those that run low on gasoline as they sit in those traffic jams are discovering that a lot of gas stations are already totally out of fuel. In fact, as you will see below, CNN is reporting that 1,300 Florida gas stations have now run out of gasoline, and more gas stations are going dry with each passing hour. Whether willingly or unwillingly, vast numbers of people are going to end up stuck in this storm, and the death toll is likely to be extremely high.
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According to the National Weather Service, it appears that this will be “the worst storm to impact the Tampa area in over 100 years”…
“If the storm stays on the current track, it will be the worst storm to impact the Tampa area in over 100 years,” the National Weather Service in Tampa warned, adding, “Milton continues to pose a potentially catastrophic threat to parts of the west Florida coast.”
100 years ago, not that many people lived in that part of Florida.
Today, more than 3 million people live in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area.
Early on Tuesday, Milton had been downgraded to a Category 4 storm, but then it strengthened again and sustained winds were back up to 155 mph…
Milton had undergone stunningly rapid intensification Monday, its sustained winds reaching 180 mph. By Tuesday the wind speed dropped dramatically although still a fierce Category 4 storm. It climbed back to 155 Tuesday afternoon, just below Category 5 status. Fluctuations were expected as the storm closes in on Florida, said John Cangialosi, a specialist with the National Hurricane Center.
As I write this article, sustained winds are back up to 165 miles per hour, and that officially makes Milton a Category 5 storm once again.
This is a very, very unusual storm.
According to one meteorologist, Milton actually produced “more than 58,000 lightning events in just 14 hours”…
The amount of lightning in Hurricane Milton is “unlike any event” meteorologist Chris Vagasky has ever seen in the Atlantic Basin.
Hurricane Milton’s eyewall, where the storm’s strongest winds are, exhibited more than 58,000 lightning events in just 14 hours, according to Vagasky, a meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
That’s more than one lightning event every second, which he described as “astounding.”
We have never seen anything quite like this before.
Of course the most dangerous aspect of this storm for those living directly along the coast will be the storm surge.
It is being projected that a 15 foot wall of water will hit Tampa like a sledgehammer, and the mayor of Tampa is warning that those that choose to stay “are going to die”…
The mayor of Tampa, a city that’s in the crosshairs of Hurricane Milton, issued a grave warning to Florida residents who don’t heed calls to evacuate ahead of the monster storm.
“If you choose to stay … you are going to die,” Mayor Jane Castor bluntly said on CNN while talking about the dangers of Milton, a “literally catastrophic” Category 5 hurricane that’s barreling toward the Sunshine State.
A Weather Channel host named Jen Carfagno used CGI to try to show her viewers what a 15 foot storm surge will look like…
Carfagno then let the simulation rise above nine feet – well above her head. The raging torrent had hit the second floor of nearby homes.
She said: ‘There are few places that are safe when the water rises this high.’
Current forecasts suggest Hurricane Milton could actually trigger storm surges of 15 feet, far higher than the frightening nine feet shown by the Weather Channel.
Most of the Tampa Bay area is just barely above sea level.
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