Hurricane Milton: Florida faces jammed roads and gas demands amid mass evacuations
- Fleeing residents face gridlock and gas shortages on evacuation routes.
- For Floridians who can’t evacuate, it’s a financial hardship: “I just feel like we’re sitting ducks now.”
OCALA, Fla. — Hurricane Milton continued to intensify as it neared Florida’s Gulf Coast, bringing with it a life-threatening storm surge and destructive winds and forcing residents to jam major evacuation routes to avoid the worst of the storm.
The wind field of the Category 5 hurricane, an indication of the area it could affect, is expected to roughly double by the time it makes landfall, the National Weather Service said Tuesday.
“Milton has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida,” forecasters wrote.
Worse, the storm is the second half of a meteorological one-two punch to Florida’s west coast. Hurricane Helene entered Florida’s Big Bend region late on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 storm, eventually claiming more than 230 lives as it left a trail of devastation from Florida to Tennessee.
“For Tampa Bay, Helene was the worst storm in a century,” a headline in the Miami Herald declared last week after the storm made landfall, causing record surges and historic damage.
On Wednesday, Milton, the fifth-most-intense storm to come out of the Atlantic Ocean, may hit Tampa Bay directly.
Despite reports of a severe staffing shortage at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference Tuesday that he wasn’t concerned about it affecting Florida’s response to the storm.
“We have a machine,” DeSantis said. “We have more people on hand than we’ve ever had.”
The federal government is providing more than a dozen specialized disaster recovery teams, including urban search and water rescue teams from FEMA and the Coast Guard, the White House said in a news release Tuesday. About 20 million meals and 40 million liters of water have been put in place to address the ongoing needs of Helene and Milton victims, the White House said.
The governor also said there was no gas shortage in the state, posting a video on X of Florida Highway Patrol escorting fuel trucks to stations along the evacuation route, despite 15% of the state’s gas stations reporting they were running out.
National Hurricane Center forecasters in Miami warned residents there would not be enough time to evacuate if they waited until Wednesday morning to leave.
“I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever,” Tampa Bay Mayor Jane Castor said on CNN on Monday. “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”
On social media, Hillsborough County residents shared videos of deputies driving down roads in evacuation areas playing a public safety message through loudspeakers.
“If you choose not to evacuate, you do so at your own risk,” the recording said. “Once the weather conditions begin to deteriorate and flooding conditions begin, officers may not be able to help you leave your home.”
In a TikTok video taken by St. Petersburg resident Ryan Escott around 8:40 p.m. Monday, an officer is seen driving through his neighborhood with the recording playing. Piles of debris can be seen in front of almost every house, illuminated by emergency lights.
Escott’s home was flooded during Helene, as shown in another video recorded two weeks ago, with 7 inches of water throughout. All of the family’s undamaged belongings after Helene fit on a 20-foot trailer, he said as he evacuated to his sister’s home in the Clearwater area.
“Me and all my neighbors are going through some tough times,” Escott said in a direct message to a Times reporter. “No one is helping us externally besides our amazing community and I’m thankful to all of them.”
The northbound lanes of Interstate 75, which runs west from Fort Lauderdale to Naples before heading north through Tampa and into Georgia, were gridlocked for much of Monday and into Tuesday morning. Congestion on the interstate and other major roads continued to hamper evacuation efforts Tuesday afternoon. Highway shoulders were being used as additional lanes, and tolls were suspended in an effort to help people evacuate quickly.
Images of a Florida man standing behind a TV weather reporter in the midst of a roaring hurricane seem to go viral every year. But staying behind in an evacuation zone is a reality for many Floridians, even if they want to flee.
In a TikTok video posted Monday and now viewed almost 5 million times, a woman in a southwest Florida evacuation zone said she just didn’t have the money to move her large family to a safer place. “Where am I taking six kids and four dogs and three adults to?” she asked.
“I would have to book, like, an Airbnb or something,” she said, “because I can’t afford to do that.” Hotels heading north or inland were fully booked, she said, and flying to another state wasn’t financially possible.
“I just feel like we’re sitting ducks now,” she said.
