Florida’s longest night as Hurricane Milton hits: ‘There is a lot of flooding’

Hurricane Milton hit Florida earlier than expected as millions of people remained confined to their homes or sheltered in safe places. “There is a lot of rain and wind,” said José Luis Rodríguez, who was sheltering with his family inside their home in Hillsborough County. Since Tuesday, Rodríguez has been preparing for this moment, following numerous warnings that Milton could be one of the deadliest natural phenomena to hit the country in recent years.

Carla Cabanes, a resident of Town ‘N’ Country, north of Tampa, explaind by phone that in those first moments the hurricane felt “very strong” and that there were “very strong winds,” which they could hear while playing dominoes or checking the news from time to time to find out about damage from the storm. Although everything was all right inside the house, they knew that the next morning they could be waking up to scenes of desolation outside.

The National Hurricane Center warned of a “flash flood emergency” in the Tampa Bay area as the hurricane, now downgraded to a Category 1, continued to move inland. An extreme wind warning was issued in the St. Petersburg metropolitan area and record rainfall was reported in the area, with more than five inches (12 centimeters) accumulating in just one hour.

Venus Carrillo thought the hurricane would hit Florida around midnight as predicted, at the same time as her husband’s birthday. But Milton was early and had already made landfall in the Sunshine State at 8:30 p.m. local time, with winds of more than 125 miles per hour. “Right now we are feeling strong gusts of wind,” Carrillo said by phone from Naples, south of Tampa. However, it was still too early to measure the extent of the damage it could cause. “What there is in Naples is a lot of flooding.”

Barring any power outages in her area (as has already happened to nearly three million people), Carrillo, her husband and her six-year-old son were planning to spend the evening playing Monopoly and Scrabble, then celebrating the father’s birthday with a bread pudding that Venus made herself, given the impossibility of going out to buy groceries during the curfew that the authorities have decreed in her area.

Meanwhile, on social media, some Florida residents have shared videos showing the effects of the high water and strong winds. On X, meteorologist Reed Timmer posted images of flooding of homes in Venice Bay.

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