The Tampa Bay area has been brushed by many hurricanes in the last few decades, but more than a century has passed since the area, 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 devastated 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 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.
Mr. Davis said that Milton’s threat should be taken seriously, and he compared it to the storm in 1921.
“Obviously, Tampa looks very different than it did 100 years ago,” he said, but even so, in 1921 “they had 10 to 15-plus feet of storm surge in Tampa Bay.”
Current forecasts for Milton’s storm surge are not quite that high yet, Mr. Davis said, but they could easily reach 10 to 15 feet. That would be more than double the storm surge that the area experienced during Hurricane Helene.
The region’s coastal landscape was altered by Helene, he said: Barrier islands were badly damaged, sand dunes were destroyed, sand levels were left “very low” and many of the trees and other natural vegetation that are usually present along beaches were uprooted.
“Just after our latest hurricane, we are extremely vulnerable, especially to surge,” he said.
Along with storm surge, Milton brings the threat of wind damage, with sustained winds of up to 125 miles an hour and gusts up to 160 m.p.h. And there are dangers associated with flooding and rainfall, he added.
“Our ground is extremely saturated from several hurricanes already this year, and we’re going to have river flooding,” Mr. Davis said. “So people that may be 20 miles inland from the coast won’t get storm surge, but they could get rainfall flooding, river flooding, retention ponds could flood creeks. And if we get a lot of debris that clogs storm water drains, then that water can’t get in the storm water drains easily and that can make flooding even worse.”
Mr. Davis said people who are advised to evacuate should evacuate.
“We are telling people this will be like the worst hurricane in their lifetime in Tampa Bay,” he said.
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