pesowin Tampa Residents Warned to Expect ‘Worst Hurricane in Their Lifetime’
The Tampa Bay area has been brushed by many hurricanes in the last few decadespesowin, but more than a century has passed since the region, halfway down the length of Florida on the state’s Gulf Coast, has sustained a direct hit from a major hurricane.
That has given many local residents a false sense of safety, a longstanding expectation that they will be spared, according to experts.
“People have some superstitions about, ‘Oh, we haven’t been hit,’ but that’s absolutely false,” said Rick Davis, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Tampa. “We’ve definitely been hit with major hurricanes. Just not in anyone’s current lifetime.”
The metropolitan area around Tampa Bay includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, and is now home to about three million people.
In October 1921, when the population was only about 120,000, the Tampa Bay area was hit by a Category 3 storm that shredded fishing piers and smashed steamships into docks. The storm submerged railroad cars and leveled trees and utility poles. Eight people died in the storm, nearly half drowned by the storm surge that inundated the shoreline.
Mr. Davis said Tampa Bay was also hit by three major storms in the 1800s, including a hurricane known as the Great Gale of 1848. That one destroyed nearly all the buildings in the area, which was then little more than a settlement of several hundred people near a military outpost, Fort Brooke.
Timing is critical, Mr. Davis said.
“This is the time of year where the tracks have a higher chance of hitting the Tampa Bay region from the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “The previous storms that hit Tampa did just this. They formed in the Western Gulf and they went almost straight east into parts of the Florida peninsula, right around Tampa Bay.”
The 1921 storm struck in late October; the storm in 1848, in late September.
Hurricane Milton, which rapidly intensified in the Gulf of Mexico on Monday, becoming a Category 5 storm, is expected to make landfall somewhere near Tampa as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday, according to the Weather Service.
Like in 1921, the storm surge is expected to be 10 to 15 feet. The surge could be more damaging because of Hurricane Helene, which damaged barrier islands and wiped out sand dunes and beaches when it swept through last month. “Just after our latest hurricane, we are extremely vulnerable, especially to surge,” Mr. Davis said.
Milton is also expected to bring sustained winds of 125 miles per hour, with gusts up to 155 m.p.h., heavy rainfall and dangerous flooding.
Mr. Davis said that people on the coast who had been advised to evacuate should evacuate, but that even those inland of Tampa should be on guard for rainfall and river flooding.
“We are telling people this will be like the worst hurricane in their lifetime in Tampa Baypesowin,” he said.
