Hurricane Milton has quickly evolved from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane. This happened in just over 24 hours – it is one of the fastest strengthening rates ever observed on Earth. Meteorologists have even begun to speculate that Milton could approach the theoretical maximum intensity of an Atlantic Basin hurricane of 200 mph, surpassing the record set by Hurricane Allen in 1980.

In response to Milton, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is ordering millions of people to leave their homes and move to safety — the state’s largest evacuation since Category 5 Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Milton is expected to make landfall just north of Tampa Bay due to strong winds and waves whipped up by the record hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico. While Milton could weaken or strike elsewhere, this is the track it is currently on is remarkably similar to the 1921 Tampa Bay hurricane, the most recent major hurricane to make landfall in that particular region.

This all comes on the heels of Category 4 Hurricane Helene, which hit Florida in late September. Although it made landfall significantly further north, it produced “several million cubic yards” of storm debris in the Tampa area. Thousands of beachside shops and homes were damaged, and the wreckage was jumbled up by record flooding. Now Milton’s approach is creating surreal scenes: Tampa Bay Times reporter Max Chesnes posted a video to X showing one side of a street with piles of Helene’s debris. On the other side was a block-long line to collect sandbags in preparation for Milton (sandbags can help block water).

Although not a direct hit, Helene was still the worst hurricane the Tampa Bay region has seen in more than 100 years and added to the damage caused by Category 1 Hurricane Debby earlier this year. That already makes for a hellish hurricane season in Florida. But the worst may yet come for Milton.

As of Monday morning, Milton’s peak storm surge forecast by the National Hurricane Center for Tampa Bay was 8 to 11 feet, and will almost certainly be revised higher. That would double the record water levels set by Hurricane Helene. It would also eclipse the surge the region faced during the 1921 hurricane.

That Tampa has not had a Category 3 or higher landfall in more than 100 years is a fluke not lost on regional planners. Four years ago, communities in the Tampa area did a tabletop exercise to simulate the response to a hurricane that looked eerily similar to Milton, called Hurricane Phoenix.

The fictional Hurricane Phoenix even had its own terrifying cinematic trailer, created by the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council:

According to a decade-old estimate from Karen Clark and Co., a Boston-based catastrophe modeling firm, a direct hit on Tampa Bay by a Category 5 hurricane could cause more than $175 billion in damage and possibly thousands of deaths — a hurricane A disaster on a Katrina scale, or worse. And that’s just in itself.

But this hurricane isn’t even happening in isolation. Helene and Milton’s one-two punch is what climatologists call a “compound event.” With little to no time to prepare between landfalls, the human misery becomes greater than the sum of the two storms individually. It’s something that was highlighted as a symptom of climate change in the most recent National Climate Assessment released by the Biden administration last year. With sea levels rising and flooding becoming more common, people in Tampa are already fearing the impact of further increases in housing costs that this year’s storm season is likely to bring.

Driven in part by decades of good luck with hurricanes — most of the damage happens elsewhere in the state — urban west-central Florida has expanded rapidly. Over the past 50 years, the Tampa-St. The Petersburg-Clearwater metro area added nearly 2.5 million people, a growth of 187 percent.

A century of frenetic beachfront development led to irrational choices, the epicenter of which is low-lying Pinellas County. A million people live there, crammed into a narrow peninsula that juts out into the Gulf and includes a chain of eleven barrier islands. If Milton strikes as currently predicted, Pinellas County will never be the same.

Tampa Bay’s ocean depth makes the region particularly vulnerable to the effects of a direct hit from a hurricane. The shallow river mouth allows floodwaters to flow into the bay, making the metro area one of the most at-risk places in the world for storm surges. While the current forecast is lower for now, a major hurricane like Milton could produce a storm surge of 20 to 30 feet in the worst-case scenario, on behalf of Hurricane Katrina. A direct hit by a Category 5 just north of Tampa Bay would maximize the amount of storm surge; If – when – such a situation occurs, it is expected to be the costliest natural disaster in US history. Whether Milton will achieve this worst-case scenario remains to be seen – but things are currently shaping up to be very, very bad either way.

Insurance companies saw this coming, but that doesn’t mean they created a reliable safety net. For decades, private home insurers in Florida have raised rates as the population grew. But in 2022, a near miss from Hurricane Ian raised nerves and led to thousands of homeowners’ policies being dropped.

If millions of people threatened by record-breaking hurricane disasters in a span of fourteen days weren’t enough, former President Donald Trump and his allies are fueling conspiracy theories and malicious disinformation about the government’s relief response for political gain. Worse, and stranger, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed, then doubled down on the wild theory that “they” control hurricanes and send them to Republican states in an effort to influence the election.

In response, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an interview Sunday that misinformation about hurricane relief is “actively harming and disrupting the process of getting back to normal.”

The reality of climate change is bad enough without late-stage capitalism and MAGA making it worse. For those in Milton’s path, the Centers for Disease Control maintains a disaster hotline if you need someone to talk Unpleasant.