“I’ve lived here since 1982. I have two houses in Parrish and I just get some last-minute things,” Wakefield said. “I feel fine, I’m not panicking because we still had a lot left from the last one (Hurricane Helene) a few weeks ago.” Read more about preparing for Hurricane Milton.

Read the full story: Preparations for Hurricane Milton continue in Florida

Milton, the rapidly developing hurricane that shows no signs of stopping, will not technically become a Category 6 because the category does not currently exist. But the storm could reach the level of a hypothetical Category 6 — further fueling debate over whether the National Hurricane Center’s long-used scale for classifying hurricane wind speeds from Category 1 to 5 might need an overhaul.

If Milton had reached winds of 200 miles per hour, it would have exceeded a threshold that only five hurricanes and typhoons have reached since 1980, according to Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jim Kossin, a retired federal scientist. and scientific advisor at the nonprofit First Street Foundation.

The pair wrote a study examining whether the extreme storms could become the basis for a Category 6 hurricane designation. All five storms occurred in the past decade. Kossin and Wehner said they were not proposing to add a Category 6 to the wind scale, but were trying to “inform broader discussions” about communicating the growing risks in a warming world.