Florida has expanded its state of emergency as it braces for a major storm expected to pummel the state’s western peninsula by midweek, after Tropical Storm Milton gathered strength and was declared a category 1 hurricane on Sunday.
The impending landfall of Milton comes days after Hurricane Helene caused devastation and destruction through large swaths of Florida and other parts of the south-east of the US including North Carolina. The death toll stands at 230 people, and is expected to rise.
Forecasters expect Milton to continue to build, and could approach a category 3 hurricane or higher as it hits the Florida peninsula on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. The National Weather Service said there could be life-threatening storm surge and damaging winds, and urged local residents to follow evacuation orders as counties began to prepare for Milton’s arrival.
Kevin Guthrie, director of Florida’s emergency management division, urged people to prepare for the “largest evacuation that we have seen most likely since 2017 Hurricane Irma”. More than 6.8 million people were evacuated for Irma.
“I highly encourage you to evacuate,” Guthrie told Floridians in a press conference.
The Tampa Bay Times reported that 51 counties were under a state of emergency which had been expanded Sunday morning as Milton strengthened.
Counties on Florida’s west coast were readying for the storm surge and flooding. Pinellas county issued mandatory evacuation orders for six hospitals, 25 nursing homes and 44 assisted living facilities, totaling about 6,600 patients, according to the county’s emergency management department. Pasco county issued mandatory evacuations to go into effect on Monday at 10am for all those living in low-lying or flood-prone areas.
Residents in parts of Florida whose lives have been upended by Helene now worry that a second wave of catastrophe could be imminent as debris left by the first disaster is shifted in further overpowering rains.
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said on Sunday that while it remained to be seen just where Milton would strike, it was clear that Florida was going to be hit hard: “I don’t think there’s any scenario where we don’t have major impacts at this point.”
As many as 4,000 national guard troops were helping state crews to remove debris, DeSantis said, and he directed that Florida crews dispatched to North Carolina in Helene’s aftermath return to the state to prepare for Milton.
“All available state assets … are being marshaled to help remove debris,” DeSantis said. “We’re going 24-7 … it’s all hands on deck.”
#Milton is forecast to quickly intensify while it moves across the Gulf of Mexico and be a major hurricane when it reaches the west coast of the Florida Peninsula mid-week. Do not focus on the small details of the current forecast, as there remains significant uncertainty in the… pic.twitter.com/299CNpAwxA
— National Weather Service (@NWS) October 6, 2024
Florida is the state mostly directly in the current expected path of Milton but the National Weather Service in Wilmington North Carolina warned that local impacts in north-east South Carolina and south-east North Carolina “are currently expected to be high surf & strong rip currents along with gusty winds along the coast”.
Joe Biden on Sunday ordered an additional 500 US troops to be sent into the hurricane-stricken area of North Carolina, bringing the total of active-duty troops assisting with response and recovery to 1,500. That is on top of 6,000 national guards personnel and 7,000 federal workers.
“My administration is sparing no resource to support families,” the president said.
The new storm barreling towards the western coast of Florida presents the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) with a whole new level of crises. The agency has already had to respond to swirling misinformation concerning Helene, amplified on the presidential campaign trail by Donald Trump and his surrogates.
Helene made landfall on the Florida Gulf coast on 26 September. It then ripped through Georgia and North Carolina, both of which are battleground states that are being aggressively fought over by the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.
The Fema administrator, Deanne Criswell, told ABC News’s This Week on Sunday that claims put out by the Trump campaign that millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money had been diverted from disaster relief to house undocumented immigrants were “frankly ridiculous and just plain false”. Criswell condemned what she called a “truly dangerous narrative”.
She added: “This kind of rhetoric is not helpful to people. It’s really a shame that we’re putting politics ahead of helping people.”
On Thursday, Trump told a rally in Saginaw, Michigan, that his Democratic opponent, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, had “spent all her Fema money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal immigrants”. Then on Sunday Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, told CNN’s State of the Union that “you have migrants being housed in luxury hotels in New York City”.
She added: “We have paid so much money from our tax dollars into the crisis that didn’t need to happen.”
The Trump line that federal funds are being redirected away from hurricane relief to housing immigrants is false. Fema does have an immigration housing fund known as the Shelter and Services Program which has been granted $650m by Congress this year, but it is separate from disaster response.
Fema has indicated that it has enough resources to deal with Helene, but may need additional funds in the event of further calamities during the hurricane season.
Trump’s falsehoods have received some pushback from Republican leaders. Thom Tillis, the US senator from North Carolina, disputed the claim that funds had been diverted to immigrants.
“We could have a discussion about the failure of this administration’s border policies and the billions of dollars it’s costing. But right now, not yet is it affecting the flow of resources to western North Carolina,” he told CBS News’s Face the Nation.
