Florida’s coast has everything to recommend it, except the real and growing risk of flooding.
As this morning dawned, Hurricane Milton was exiting Florida on its east coast, still maintaining hurricane-force winds. The storm came nerve-rackingly close to making what experts had feared would be a worst-case entrance into the state. The storm hit some 60 miles south of Tampa, striking a heavily populated area but narrowly avoiding the precarious geography of Tampa’s shallow bay. Still, the destruction, once tallied, is likely to be major. Flash flooding inundated cities and left people trapped under rubble and cars in the hurricane’s path. Multiple people were killed yesterday at a retirement community in Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, when one of the many tornadoes whipped up by Milton touched down there.
The barrier islands, if they’ve done their job, may have protected Sarasota from the worst of the storm surge, but those vulnerable strips of sand have their own small civilizations built on them, too. This stretch of southwestern Florida happens to be one of the fastest-growing parts of the state, where people are flocking to new developments, many of them on the waterfront. Milton is the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida this year, in an area that has barely had time to assess the damage from Hurricane Helene two weeks ago. Because it skirted a direct strike of Tampa Bay, the storm may soon be viewed as a near miss, which research has found can amplify risky decision making going forward. But this morning, it is a chilling reminder of the rising hazards of living in hurricane-prone places as climate change makes the most ferocious storms more ferocious.
