Tampa Bay hasn’t experienced a direct hit from a hurricane in more than 100 years — and the upcoming Category 5 Hurricane Milton is expected to bring storm surge to the low-lying city unlike anything seen in the area before.

The last time a storm hit Tampa was in October 1921, when Hurricane Tarpon Springs blew in with 120 mph winds and a 10-foot storm surge flooded the then-small city.

At least eight people died — largely due to flooding — causing ocean waves to break right downtown until the floodwaters subsided, the National Weather Service said.

And while Tampa has weathered its fair share of serious storms in the years since, the city has not had to deal with the effects of a storm in all that time.

That’s expected to change this week, when the still “explosive” intensifying Hurricane Milton makes landfall around Wednesday with a record-breaking storm surge as high as 10 feet — and experts fear the city may be unprepared for what’s to come.

“It’s a huge population. It’s very fragile, very inexperienced and that’s a losing proposition,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT, who noted that Tampa has grown exponentially since 1921, when it last faced – and was devastated by – a similar storm.

“I always thought Tampa would be the city we would be most concerned about,” he said, explaining that the low-lying, basin-like topography of the Tampa area made the area particularly vulnerable to storm surges and flooding.

Hurricane Milton is currently blowing winds of 170 mph as it barrels toward Florida. The predicted storm surges of 3 meters high have never been predicted for the area before.

As it approaches land, the raging storm is expected to lose a bit of strength and hit as a Category 3 or Category 4, Fox Weather meteorologists said.

But unlike most landfalls — where vast swaths of land quickly reduce the storm’s strength — Milton is currently forecast to blow straight across the Florida peninsula.

That means there won’t be enough land to slow the storm, and the storm will likely make its way across the entire state as a full-blown hurricane, according to Fox Weather.

Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall less than two weeks after Category 4 Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend region, bringing a storm surge of 20 feet (6 meters) before devastating the area and five other southeastern states .