Hurricane Helene besieged the Tampa Bay region with flooding not seen in generations. But as another storm churns toward Florida’s west coast, Bob Weisberg, a professor emeritus at the University of South Florida, said he is more worried now than he was before Helene struck.
“I’m fearful,” Weisberg, an expert on storm surge, said Sunday. “This storm looks like it will actually make landfall along the west coast.”
Meteorology models are still working to project just how large and intense Hurricane Milton will become by midweek, and what path it will likely take as it churns across the Gulf of Mexico. If the storm veers south of Tampa Bay, the worst of Milton’s storm surge — when fierce winds push a mass of water onshore — would miss the area. But if Milton makes landfall in the Tampa Bay region or just north, as is possible, it will have hit one of the most susceptible places in the United States to severe flooding from a powerful hurricane.
With 700 miles of shoreline, more than 3 million residents, and an economy dependent on an annual influx of winter tourists, the region could face catastrophe from a direct hit, which has not happened since 1921, experts said. But changes have worsened that risk. Sea-level rise has increased the severity of even small storms and a development boom has put more people and buildings in harm’s way.
Living near Florida’s shorelines has always meant reconciling oneself to the risks of hurricane season — or putting them out of mind. More and more people have been willing to accept that trade-off, even as the state has become an international example of the threat of sea-level rise.
The shift is especially apparent along the same area of coastline now under threat from Milton, from the Tampa Bay area south to Fort Myers and Naples.
Census records show that from 1970 to 2020, the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater metropolitan area grew by more than 187 percent. It is now home to more than 3.2 million people. Over that same period, the population of the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area ballooned to more than 760,000 people — a 623 percent increase. The North Port-Sarasota-Bradenton area grew 283 percent to almost 834,000 residents.
As more people moved in, construction followed. In Pinellas County, a peninsula jutting into the Gulf, developers built beachfront homes, hotels and businesses along a narrow chain of 11 barrier islands. The county’s largest city, St. Petersburg, grew too, as homes went up in low-lying areas prone to flooding. In recent years, its low-profile and slightly sleepy downtown has been transformed by the addition of high-rise condominiums.
Just to the east, across the bay, Tampa has seen a similarly explosive growth. In 1950, the city had about 125,000 residents. Today, that number is almost 393,000.
But it’s the build-out of the barrier islands that worries Stephen Strader, a hazards geographer and professor at Villanova University.
“If this storm makes landfall in Florida, it’s more than likely going to be a billion-dollar disaster because of the development on the coast,” Strader said. “That area has had a huge boom and part of what’s driving it has been the lack of hurricane activity — people get lulled into a sense of safety. Developers let their guard down a little.”
The hazards people face along the state’s west coast are becoming worse with sea level rise.
Since 2010, the Gulf of Mexico has experienced twice the global average rate of sea level rise, according to a Washington Post analysis. Along the Tampa Bay coast, the sea is now nearly five inches higher than it was back then, with the result that roads are increasingly being flooded by the tides and insurance companies are raising rates or leaving flood-prone areas.
Residents on the Gulf Coast have feared a direct hit from a catastrophic hurricane for years. But a series of recent hurricanes, most recently Helene, has shown that, partly because of sea level rise, it doesn’t take a direct hit to cause devastating flooding.
Though Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in the state’s sparsely populated Big Bend, far north of the Tampa Bay region, the area still experienced record-breaking storm surge. The storm delivered more than 2 feet of water above the last high water record set during Hurricane Elena in 1985. The surge unleashed chaos on beachside communities and destroyed hundreds of homes, including in neighborhoods that had never experienced significant flooding. At least a dozen people were killed.
The region’s topography puts it at high risk for storm surge. Experts have long cautioned that if a storm pushed water into Tampa Bay, it would essentially trap it in too small a space, sending storm surge levels higher. The farther up the bay, the larger the surge.
The height of the surge also depends on how shallow the water is near the coastline. In the deep water, hurricanes can whip the ocean without producing a surge. But as a storm approaches land, water pushed by its winds has nowhere to go but up and inland. Shallower water makes an area more vulnerable and Tampa Bay and Florida’s Gulf Coast are relatively shallow.
Pinellas County suffered the region’s worst damage from Helene and would also face the greatest risk should Milton strike Tampa Bay. The county is Florida’s most populous and includes St. Petersburg, Clearwater and 11 barrier islands.
Weisberg lives on one of those islands and evacuated during Helene, which destroyed homes on the island and flooded cars. Storm surge from the hurricane pushed about a foot of water into his garage. If Milton makes landfall in the area, he expects the damage to be much worse, he said, as powerful winds force water over land, allowing for waves to follow.
“That’s what causes the death and destruction,” Weisberg said. “The surge will flood; the waves will destroy. It’s really the waves that do the damage.”
Warnings about Tampa Bay’s vulnerability have been coming for a long time. In 2015, a Boston firm that analyzes potential catastrophic damage reported that the region would lose $175 billion in a storm the size of Hurricane Katrina. A World Bank study called Tampa Bay one of the 10 most at-risk areas on the globe.
It does not help that the region has barely had a chance to clean up after the last hurricane. Piles of fallen tree limbs and debris line the streets in some neighborhoods, waiting for waste haulers to pick them up. Broken appliances, sodden furniture and wood scraps litter yards. Strong wind gusts from the next hurricane could turn detritus from Helene into projectiles, creating a new threat from the wreckage of the last one.
Where the storm makes landfall could be the difference between a close call and a cataclysmic event. The hurricane’s counterclockwise winds mean that if it strikes south of Tampa Bay, the region will likely avoid serious flooding. But if the storm goes north, it is expected to bring high winds and dangerous storm surge.
The region has narrowly avoided disaster before. In 2022, when Hurricane Ian slammed into southwest Florida, early modeling briefly showed the storm hitting the bay area before more accurate forecasts moved it farther south. When the Category 4 storm made landfall on a barrier island near Fort Myers, it produced a reverse storm surge that caused the bay’s water to recede, leading to bizarre scenes of boats sitting in dry marinas and Tampa residents walking on land that had been submerged.
But in the Fort Myers area and in inland communities, the scale of the destruction was staggering. Ian delivered record-breaking storm surge in Naples and Fort Myers, toppled trees, lifted homes from their foundations, picked up boats and deposited them on streets. More than 19,000 structures in Lee County, home to Fort Myers, were destroyed or severely damaged.
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Chris Alcantara contributed to this report.