Miami, US, Oct 10 (EFE).- Hurricane Milton was moving across Florida towards the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday morning after causing major flooding and damage on the state’s west coast.
The powerful hurricane, which made landfall just south of Tampa on Wednesday evening as a category 3 storm, triggered storm surges – where seawater is pushed inland by high winds – in coastal areas and dumped massive amounts of rain.
The storm was packing winds of 100 miles per hour (160 kph) when it made landfall near Sarasota, the National Hurricane Center said.
More than 3.2 million people in the state were without power on Thursday morning, according to poweroutage.us.
In St Petersburg, a city across the bay from Tampa, city authorities had to cut the water supply after a main break. The high winds also caused a crane to collapse at a downtown construction site, while the roof of the Tropical Field baseball stadium was also damaged.
St Petersburg city officials have urged residents to shelter in place and to avoid using the city’s roads, which “are still impassable due to fallen trees and downed power lines.”
The National Weather Service said that as much as 16 inches (40 cm) of rain has fallen in parts of the region, especially in the Tampa Bay area, since the storm made landfall.
Authorities said at least two people were killed by a tornado related to the cyclone in a retirement community in St. Lucie County on Florida’s east coast.
At least 19 tornadoes were recorded in central and southern Florida on Wednesday, hours before Milton made landfall in Siesta Key.
Milton is the second hurricane to hit Florida in almost two weeks, after Helene entered the northwest of this state as a Category 4 storm on Sep. 26, leaving a trail of devastation across six states in the southeast of the US.
The hurricane formed in the Gulf of Mexico at the weekend and quickly strengthened, to the point of twice reaching Category 5, the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale, as it moved toward Florida and dumped heavy rainfall on the north of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.
Ahead of its arrival, local authorities declared a mandatory evacuation order for more than 5 million people and more than 30,000 were housed in shelters opened by state authorities in the counties most at risk of flooding. EFE
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