Highways in Florida were congested and gas stations ran out of fuel on Wednesday as residents rushed out of coastal areas under evacuation orders as Hurricane Milton makes its way to the state's Gulf Coast.
The evacuation orders added further distress to the region which bore the brunt of the recent Category 4 Hurricane Helene which killed over 200 people and destroyed thousands of homes, less than two weeks ago.
Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic, growing from a Category 1 to a Category 5 in less than 24 hours, prompting the evacuation orders, Reuters reported.
With the storm heading towards the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, home to over three million people, forecasters warned that the path could vary before the storm makes landfall late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, Reuters reported.
The storm was taking a rare west-to-east trajectory through the Gulf of Mexico, raising concerns of a deadly storm surge of 10 feet or more along Florida's Gulf Coast.
Officials from United States President Joe Biden to Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned people in evacuation zones to get out or risk death.
Milton packed maximum sustained winds of 260 kilometres per hour, the US National Hurricane Centre said, putting it at the highest level on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.
While wind speeds could drop and downgrade Milton to a lesser category, the size of the storm was growing, putting ever more coastal areas in danger.
At 10pm Central Daylight Time, the eye of the storm was 650 kilometres southwest of Tampa, moving northeast at 19kph.
Milton was expected to maintain hurricane strength as it crossed the Florida peninsula, posing storm surge danger on the state's Atlantic Coast as well.
"These extremely warm sea surface temperatures provide the fuel necessary for the rapid intensification that we saw taking place to occur," said climate scientist Daniel Gilford of Climate Central, a nonprofit research group.
"We know that as human beings increase the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, largely by burning fossil fuels, we are increasing that temperature all around the planet."
Mobile homes, nursing homes and assisted living facilities also faced mandatory evacuation.
About 2.8% of US gross domestic product is in the direct path of Milton, said Ryan Sweet, chief US economist at Oxford Economics.
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