Wednesday, October 9, 2024, 10:28 p.m.
Florida has launched an unprecedented intervention device to recover from the ravages of ‘Milton’, the hurricane from the Gulf of Mexico that headed towards Tampa early this Friday, where the authorities have carried out a general evacuation of more than six million of people. The cyclone, with enormous characteristics, was warned by its heralds around two in the afternoon (8:00 p.m. in Spain) with a succession of tornadoes that shook southern Florida, Miami-Dade, Monroe, Broward and Palm Beach.
The National Weather Service warned about the sighting of at least a dozen of them. Then came the thunderstorms, with their heavy cloudy greyness, and the wind. At the close of this edition, strong gusts exceeding 70 kilometers per hour were being recorded on the west coast and the waves were beginning to splash over the dikes as a prelude to a hurricane prepared to hit land with gusts of 230 kilometers per hour.
“It is just below category 5 and, although there is hope that it will weaken further, the forecast is that it will have a very, very strong impact, and will cause a lot of damage,” warned the governor, Ron DeSantis, in a press conference in Tallahassee. DeSantis assumed that “there will be deaths” among those who have decided to stay in their homes or the phenomenon surprises them out in the open.
The Attorney General appealed to those who have risked writing their name and social security number with an indelible marker on their arm in order to facilitate their identification in the event of death. Yesterday there was no room for compassion or words of hope.
“Better to be here”
Among those who rejected the eviction was John Gómez, 75, a Chicago resident who decided to travel to Tampa to protect his second home. “I think it’s better to be here in case something happens,” he explained. However, it was not the most common case. Many stayed because they had to care for a sick family member, lacked money for a trip, or simply turned around after seven hours in a traffic jam. “It looks very, very scary, but there is no way to leave,” says a neighbor, Ashley Khrais, on television.
The authorities opened 200,000 places in shelters and sports halls. As the rain began to intensify last night, it was possible to see straggling residents, equipped with backpacks and sleeping bags, rushing to enter one of those 149 emergency centers open in the State.
The United States Government has deployed more than 8,000 members of the National Guard and 34 search planes while 300 ambulances have been assigned to the Tampa region alone. More than 50,000 electricians from all over the country have traveled to Florida because starting this morning it will be necessary to replace power lines en masse. Some areas of the south already suffered blackouts yesterday afternoon in a territory plagued by fear, uncertainty and a sense of impending disaster.
The shops and buildings were covered with all types of panels to protect doors and windows. Sandbags were piled up in the streets against the bottom of buildings to alleviate water damage in the event of a flood. So many have been distributed that, placed in a row, they would occupy 4,000 kilometers in length. An air force military base and two airports were finalizing preparations for a natural challenge: they are facilities located just 4.3 meters above sea level and meteorologists estimate that the water can reach between three and five meters high.
Hundreds of highway patrols tried to impose order on the highways leading out of Tampa, where growing chaos set in as millions of citizens searched – “in terror” according to ‘El Nuevo Herald’ – how to escape the “most powerful cyclone in the last hundred years. The evacuees, who already numbered 5.5 million by the early hours of the day, were mostly heading toward Georgia, where roads were congested and hotels were full. “We’re trying to do whatever we can, but we’ll probably have to drive to South Carolina,” lamented Elizabeth Murphy in The Washington Post. At least 1,300 gas stations in Florida closed after running out of reserves.
No IV bags
The rescue machinery is powerful, although everything depends on the damage caused by the hurricane. You only have to look at the devastation in Georgia, the two Carolinas and Florida itself caused just two weeks ago by ‘Helene’ to realize that the level of destruction can be tremendous. In fact, health authorities are facing a serious shortage of IV bags because ‘Helene’ forced the closure of the factory that produces 60% of the units used in the United States. What happens with ‘Milton’ can only worsen this lack, although the Government is buying doses against the clock in third countries.
The previous hurricane hit a natural area of the Appalachians. But ‘Milton’ focuses on Tampa Bay, whose mouth is narrow and the coastal shelf shallow. It is also likely that the cyclone will hit the city of the same name – the commercial and leisure center of the west coast, with a census of 400,000 inhabitants – and Sarasota, a city of 50,000 residents, converted into a pilgrimage center for high-net-worth retirees. “I’m just taking pictures because this probably won’t look the same in twenty-four hours,” a woman commented yesterday while walking her dog in a stroller across the bay. The last hurricane that passed through here was in 1946.
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