The hurricane Milton knocked on Florida’s door earlier than expected while millions of people remained confined to their homes or sheltered in safe places. “There is a lot of rain and winds,” says José Luis Rodríguez, while staying safe with his family in their home in Hillsborough County. Since yesterday, Rodríguez has been preparing for this moment, given the alert that Milton It could be one of the deadliest natural phenomena among those that have hit the country in recent years.
Carla Cabanes, a resident of Town ‘N’ Country, north of Tampa, explains by phone that in those first moments the cyclone feels “very strong” and there are “very strong winds,” which they hear while playing dominoes or constantly checking the news to find out if the hurricane has caused any damage. Although for the moment everything is in order inside the house, they know that tomorrow when they wake up the panorama they find before their eyes could be much more bleak.
The National Hurricane Center has warned of a “flash flood emergency” in the Tampa Bay area, as the hurricane that made landfall as a Category 3, and then became a Category 2, continues to move inland. An extreme wind alert was issued in the St. Petersburg metropolitan area and historical records of rainfall not seen in the last thousand years were recorded, accumulating more than five inches (12 centimeters) in one hour.
Venus Carrillo thought the hurricane was going to reach Florida around midnight, as predicted, the same time as her husband’s birthday. But the hurricane moved ahead and by 8:30 p.m. (local time) it had made landfall in the Sunshine State with winds of more than 125 miles per hour. “At the moment, strong gusts of wind are being felt,” says Carrillo from Naples, south of Tampa, by phone. However, it is still too early to measure the force and the havoc it may cause. “What there is in Naples is a lot of flooding.”
If there are no power outages in the area – as 1.5 million people in the State have already begun to report – Carrillo, her husband and their six-year-old child will play Monopoly and Scrabble, and at twelve o’clock in the morning Early in the morning they will blow out candles on a bread pudding that she made herself, given the impossibility of going out shopping in the midst of the curfew that the authorities decreed in her area from four in the afternoon.
Meanwhile, on social networks, some Florida residents have shared videos where the large tides and strong hurricane winds announced by meteorologists are already a fact. On
Wednesday night will be long and the news will become known in dribs and drabs. The damage count will be added to those suffered after the passage of Helene three weeks ago. In its first advances, Milton left 1.5 million homes and businesses without electricity, according to government records. poweroutage.usand Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said about 125 homes were destroyed, the AP reports.
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