Today, I visited a logistics staging area at the Florida Horse Park in Ocala, one of our many staging sites just outside Hurricane Milton’s projected path. Florida and our partners have spent the past few days deploying personnel and equipment to strategically located sites like this.”
Your home can be rebuilt, your possessions can be replaced, but we cannot replace a life lost to the storm,
Nearly 600 ambulances and more than 30 paratransits are in operation. They will be nearby and ready to save lives as soon as the hurricane passes. The National Guard is deploying aerial, water, and ground search and rescue teams for the largest National Guard search and rescue mobilization in Florida history, ... Florida will have 43,000 linemen staged from all over the country, and they’ll be ready to restore power when it’s safe to do so.”
The climate crisis is here. It’s not a future problem, it’s a today problem, and it merits all of our attention.”
As the temperature of the planet increases, my confidence in forecasting storm intensity is decreasing.” ... I am afraid of rapid intensification cycles happening at the drop of a hat.”
But it wasn’t an exaggeration,
The Florida west coast is very sensitive to storm surge. It doesn’t take much to push water over land that would be dry,
More intense storms are going to be able to move more water, and large storms are going to move more water,
The continental shelf is quite shallow,
This is the ocean coming into your living rooms,
We still can't pinpoint an exact landfall location, especially if additional wobbles occur in the short term,
We are already very saturated. It's not going to take much water, and rainfall well ahead of this storm is going to put rivers into flood already,
Most of our rivers in west central and south Florida will be going into some stage of flood over the coming days,
Do you live near a river, canal or creek? As Hurricane #Milton approaches the Florida West Coast, please keep in mind that storm surge can travel inland up these waterways,
It all depends on the river,
Some of us may have had it in the backs of our minds that it's going to turn or it's going to miss us,
Pinellas County will continue to provide updates on potable water service and sewer service before, during and after the storm via email and text alerts to utilities' customer account holders,
Pinellas County is asking anyone who has not yet evacuated to do so now,
This is playing out to be one of our worst case scenarios for our area,
There is really no frame of reference for what that looks like here,