Floods, winds, tornadoes, storm surges and fears marked the autumn of our discontent as Tampa Bay braced for an unprecedented reckoning with the advancing wrath of Hurricane Milton, the third hurricane to hit Florida this year.
“No other year on record has more than three,” according to a report by AccuWeather, dated October 10, which preliminarily estimates damages for Milton between $160 and $180 billion. “After an early pause, the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season is now above normal by all measures.”
Indeed, the North Atlantic basin between August 13 and September 2, for the first time since 1968, did not produce a named storm, according to a Moody’s report. The unexpected midseason lull was not to last for Florida, as the one-two punch of major hurricanes left in its wake new records, grim realities, massive power outages, costly cleanups and a dogged determination to support, rebuild and endure.
Hurricane Debby, as a Category 1 storm, made landfall in Steinhatchee on August 5. Hurricane Helene on September 26, also in the Big Ben area, made landfall near Perry as a Category 4 storm. Then, on October 9, Hurricane Milton as a Category 3 storm roared into Siesta Key, a coastal community about 50 miles south of Tampa. Together, Helene and Milton caused Hillsborough County schools to close for 11 days.
“Milton will go down as one of the most damaging and impactful storms in Florida history,” the AccuWeather report notes, “along with Hurricane Helene’s estimated total damages and economic loss of $225 to $250 billion just two weeks earlier, which resulted in significant damage from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the southern Appalachians, where a catastrophic flooding disaster occurred.”
Death and destruction left in the wake of the winds, rain and surges were compounded by the outbreak of tornadoes attributed to Hurricane Milton. With the final tally yet to be tabulated, the count was at least 41 as of October 19, according to a report attributed to the National Weather Service, which reportedly issued 126 tornado warnings as Milton approached.
According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, the latest numbers are likely to put Milton in 13th place for most tornadoes produced by a U.S. hurricane since 1995. AccuWeather reports that “the record-holder for tornadoes spawned by a hurricane is 120 with Hurricane Ivan in 2004.”
Meanwhile, Hurricane Milton is the fifth hurricane to make landfall in the Gulf Coast this season, after Berry, Debby, Francine and Helene. This ties the counts for both the 2005 and 2020 hurricane seasons.
“Only the year 1886 had more, with six hurricanes making landfall in the Gulf that season,” according to the AccuWeather report. For the continental U.S., “having five landfalling hurricanes ranks third for number of strikes.”
As Hurricane Milton raced toward Florida as a Category 5 behemoth, Tampa Bay residents braced for what many feared would be ‘the big one.’ Thanks to its eventual circulation a bit more than 20 miles to the south, Tampa Bay averted a catastrophic storm surge, and Milton failed to go on record as the worst storm ever in Tampa Bay’s history.
According to the National Weather Service, the Tampa Bay area on October 25, 1921, suffered the most destructive hurricane to hit the area since the ‘Great Gale of 1848,’ with winds estimated near 120 miles per hours near landfall in Tarpon Springs and a storm surge of up to 11 feet.
