The time before a hurricane is always a strange time. A time suspended, put on pause, where people, forced to rest, look at the clock and wait for the moment of disaster. This is how Carla Cabanes feels, who will never be seen playing dominoes on a Wednesday afternoon except this Wednesday, October 9, while waiting for the hurricane Milton I just passed through Tampa, Florida, where I had not passed through a similar one for more than half a century. She has a broth that her husband prepared and a lot of coffee, what she needs to wait out “an extremely dangerous hurricane,” as described by the National Hurricane Center.
On Monday, at his workplace, they asked him not to return until further notice. He went home, bought everything he needed at Walmart and Billy’s and, although the area where he lives is not an evacuation zone, he secured the windows and doors with wood because he is afraid after seeing the disaster a few weeks ago. that left Helene. “That storm left a lot of damage, especially in evacuation areas, there were houses that lost everything, including cars, there was penetration of the sea up to seven feet high. And when we were already going through that, the news came Milton” he says by phone from his home in Town ‘N’ Country, north of Tampa.
It has not touched land and Milton It has scared almost all of Florida, especially the residents of Tampa, Sarasota and Fort Myers, the meteorologists and those who report the weather report. It has even played with people’s spirits: it was announced as a category five, it gave a respite when it dropped to four, but it rose again and is expected to reach the western coast of Florida at least as a category 3. It has maximum sustained winds of almost 250 km/h with strong gusts and, according to the Center, coastal communities face a “life-threatening” storm surge. Near midnight Milton will arrive in the Sunshine State.
Adriana Novoa, an Argentine history professor at the University of South Florida, left her home in New Tampa on Monday and hit the road to a hotel in Georgia, which she plans to leave on Friday. Although his area does not have an evacuation order, in 2017 he had an experience with the hurricane Irma that you would not like to repeat. “That time we decided to leave at the last minute and it was a nightmare, there was nowhere we could stay, it was a very difficult experience,” he says. Like almost all Floridians, Novoa is shocked by the forecasts for Miltonbut it does not seem like a rarity or something that nature has not been warning about for a long time. “It was obvious that we were going to have a bad season because the water in the Gulf is boiling. Every year we have had threats of major storms, that did not happen with this frequency before,” he says.
She is sure that climate change is something serious and yet governments seem to care very little about it. As a university professor, Novoa says that she has been prohibited from talking about climate change. “For me this is very unnerving. At the university we can’t talk about climate change, or put it in writing or anything, it’s like it doesn’t officially exist, at least at the university. I teach at a state school and they don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist, we are in a time of censorship. There is no awareness of avoiding construction that is done in Florida near water,” he says.
He is also concerned about the time that will come after the disaster and who will be in charge of recovery in a state whose government has particularly attacked immigrants, who often shoulder the burden of construction work. “It’s going to be difficult to get people to work and rebuild. “Our governor scared away illegal people, many have left Florida and that can be a problem in getting labor.”
The Hurricane Center has said it clearly: Milton “has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida.” Entire communities could be flooded. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reported that the flooding it will cause “will be deadly” and recommended that when the storm begins people do not leave “the place of refuge, since driving conditions will be impossible.”
If the storm passes near or just north of Tampa Bay, waves could be between 8 and 12 feet high. That’s why Guillermo Santana grabbed his car and left with his partner from Saint Petersburg, a city located between the bay and the Gulf of Mexico, and which had an evacuation order. It took them five hours to leave the State.
“That seemed like a western. People with trailers, with boats, I had never seen that traffic in my life, a line of almost a mile with cars to get gas. but the storm Helene opened our eyes. That’s why I picked up everything, left everything clean, nothing that could fly. This year we also decided to secure the impact windows.”
Right now all that’s left is to wait for the trajectory and the after Miltona hurricane that could leave much more damage than Helenewhich claimed the lives of more than 200 people and was declared the deadliest since Katrina in 2005. Estimates from BMO Capital Markets say that losses could exceed $75 billion.
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