Monster storm slams into Florida; deaths confirmed

Hurricane Milton’s maximum sustained winds dropped to 110 mph as it continued to move inland, the National Hurricane Center said in a 10 p.m. advisory.

That wind speed would make the hurricane on the high end of a Category 2 storm on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

The Tampa Bay area, including Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater, was under a flash flood emergency, the National Hurricane Center said. People there are urged to move to higher ground and to not drive through floodwaters.

The hurricane made landfall near Siesta Key as a Category 3 storm at around 8:30 p.m.

Power outages have knocked out many of the lights in Fort Myers. The wind continues to whip as Milton passes over.

Time-lapse video shows clouds and rain over Sarasota as Hurricane Milton approached the state.

In St. Petersburg, 5 inches of rain fell in one hour, adding to the foot of rain that was dumped on the city in the last 24 hours. Catastrophic flooding will occur with the rain across the region.

Farther south, there is a storm surge.

Bradenton and St. Petersburg have recorded winds up to 96 mph, and in Sarasota, 90 mph winds were recorded. Wind destruction is also expected across the region.

What’s making this storm even more dangerous is that it will move east and traverse Florida in the next day. Normally, a storm will weaken over land, but because Florida is not that wide, it does not give the storm much opportunity to come down in terms of strength.

The potential for tornadoes remains on the outer bands of the storm as it moves across the state.

Wind speeds have picked to 102 mph in Sarasota. The tops of palm trees are being shredded and sent scattering into the dark. We heard metal scraping as it was ripped off its base.

Even from the inside of a parking garage several feet above sea level, our crews can see water on the street rising quickly.

NBC News’ Tom Llamas and his team escaped strong gusts and rain from Hurricane Milton as it entered Sarasota.

While it was reporting out in the storm, the team had to rush inside as wind and rain became too powerful to bear, with Llamas saying a transformer exploded over them as the storm picked up.

NBC News meteorologist Angie Lassman explained what their crew experienced: first, a drop in pressure and extreme calm as the eye passed over the area. Once the eye passed, though, Llamas and his crew experienced the worst Milton has to offer.

The eye wall is where the strongest winds live, as evidenced by Llamas and his crew’s being blown from their location. But Lassman said that the crew is not in the worst of it and that conditions are even more aggressive a little farther north.

The heavy rain, dangerous storm surges and catastrophic wind gusts meteorologists expected when Hurricane Milton made landfall are beginning to take shape, said Jamie Rhome, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center.

“All of the hazards that were predicted with this particular landfall are unfolding,” he said.

NOAA has already received a report of wind gust of over 102 mph and expects the peak storm surge to be 9 to 13 feet.

The agency is closely monitoring the Interstate 4 corridor that connects Tampa, Orlando and Daytona because of the dense population and expected hazardous conditions in the next several hours, Rhome said.

A tornado that hit St. Lucie County this afternoon as Hurricane Milton approached the state killed multiple people, Sheriff Keith Pearson said.

The tornado touched down at 4:28 p.m. in the Spanish Lakes Country Club community in Fort Pierce, he said. A spokesperson for the St. Lucie Fire District said that there were two confirmed deaths and that multiple other people were taken to hospitals.

The effects of Milton triggered tornadoes across Florida as it approached the state’s Gulf Coast. There have been 19 confirmed tornado touchdowns statewide, Gov. Ron DeSantis said.

County Communications Director Erick Gill said that there were multiple tornadoes that hit the county. “We have multiple crews and agencies responding to this event, which is unfolding as we speak,” he said in a 6:15 p.m. update.

St. Lucie Board of Commissioners Vice Chair Chris Dzadovsky urged people to stay home because of the threat of tornadoes from Milton. St. Lucie County is on the Atlantic Coast.

A transformer blew out and the lights are flickering on and off in downtown Fort Myers as floodwaters begin to overtake the streets.

Storm surge is now the biggest concern for this area, especially when you factor in powerful sustained winds.

First responders have said they are unlikely to conduct rescues in the middle of the storm, which means anyone who did not evacuate will now have to wait out the hurricane.

Nearly 100,000 people are in Florida’s evacuation centers tonight — nowhere near the state’s capacity, a top emergency management official said.

Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said roughly 220,000 beds were available across the state earlier today.

Although some counties reported their shelters were at capacity, Guthrie said, officials still said they had plenty of room left.

At nearly every turn, Hurricane Milton has offered surprises. 

What started as a small, tightly wound hurricane has grown into a sprawling monster that intensified at one of the fastest rates in recorded history. The storm threatens to send a dangerous surge of water to parts of both Florida’s west and east coasts, with the flood-prone metropolitan area of Tampa Bay — home to more than 3 million people — at particular risk. 

As the storm developed, record warm seas in the Gulf of Mexico aided its intensification. Later, it grew in size as it underwent a process of eyewall replacement. 

Here’s how Milton developed into such a significant threat. 

Read the full story here.

Intense wind and rain swirled around storm chaser Ben McMillan as he shouted over loud gusts live on NBC News in Bradenton, where Milton is raging.

He said significant storm surges were coming in from the bay as conditions quickly go downhill. He added that he is seeing power flashes in the distance.

“The last few moments have gotten extremely violent with the wind,” McMillan said. “It’s safe to say the storm is not over yet.”

About 160,000 customers don’t have power in Sarasota County, where emergency management officials are also closely tracking the storm surge.

Sarasota County Emergency Management Chief Sandra Tapfumaneyi said that much of the area experienced a storm surge of about 5 to 6 feet during Hurricane Helene and that anything more than that would be catastrophic for the area.

The center of Milton was moving inland into Florida at 9 p.m. after the hurricane made landfall not far from Sarasota around a half-hour earlier, forecasters said.

The center of Milton, which made landfall as a Category 3 storm, was around 5 miles north of Sarasota, and it was moving east-northeast at 15 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm’s maximum sustained wind speed was 115 mph, which makes it still a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

Life-threatening storm surge, extreme winds and flash flooding continue as the hurricane moves inland, the National Hurricane Center said.

Sarasota remains in the eye of the storm, where it has been eerily quiet for about 45 minutes.

I’ve covered a lot of hurricanes, and you forget how still it can get. Trees were knocked down earlier, and then suddenly it just stopped.

Some people have come out in their cars and out of their hotel rooms to look around when they should be sheltering in place. When we get to the back of the eye wall, it will be a very different story.

People in the Sarasota area have been taking the threat of Hurricane Milton and its storm surge seriously after what happened with Hurricane Helene, the mayor said.

Helene flooded Florida’s Gulf Coast with storm surge before it made landfall in the Big Bend on Sept. 26. More than 240 people died in six states, including 25 in Florida.

“People after Helene realized that it really isn’t a joke to say that there’s going to be storm surge,” Sarasota Mayor Liz Alpert said.

“Before that, we heard that all the time — I have to admit myself — but it never happened,” Alpert said. “But this time it happened. People saw what it could do and took this warning seriously.”

In Charlotte County, south of Sarasota, some past storms were mainly severe winds, Sheriff Bill Prummell said.

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Power outages are rising rapidly in Florida, with 1,115,813 customers powerless at 9:15 p.m., according to poweroutage.us, about 45 minutes after Milton made landfall.

Sarasota, Manatee and Hardee are the most affected counties. Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall, is in Sarasota County.

Officials in Orlando are warning residents that if they aren’t sheltered in place in the next 30 minutes, it’ll be too late.

The eye of Milton is passing over Sarasota and will continue to creep east across the state toward Orlando.

Electricity is flickering in and out. Palm trees appear as though they’re about to snap. Street lamps waver back and forth.

Even from the safety of my Tampa hotel room, Milton’s ferociousness is becoming increasingly hard to look away from.

In Tampa, about 73 miles north of where Milton made landfall near Siesta Key, ferocious gusts are blowing.

Trees are being bent over by the wind and signs are on the ground across the city as it faces a one-two punch it has not experienced in a very long time.

It has been raining all day in Tampa, but the rain has gotten much stronger recently. In one area of the city, 2 to 3 inches of rain per hour could fall, on top of what has already fallen today.

In total, Tampa could get upward of a foot of rain just weeks after it was flooded by Hurricane Helene.

The night appeared quiet and calm in Sarasota as Milton’s eye passed over tonight, but the hurricane’s most powerful winds and storm surge are still expected to come.

With no rain or wind, drivers could be seen doing donuts, racing and driving toward nearby barrier islands.

In anticipation of the incoming danger, authorities were nowhere to be seen.

About 10 people were injured in Wellington after a reported tornado today as Hurricane Milton approached Florida, the town manager said.

There were varying levels of injury, from minor to those requiring life support, Wellington Village Manager Jim Barnes said.

Some buildings were obliterated, cars were flipped and came to rest against houses, and trees were torn down, said Barnes, who witnessed some of the devastation.

Wellington is a town of around 65,000 close to the Atlantic coast, about 13 miles west of West Palm Beach.

There were 19 confirmed tornado touchdowns in Florida today as the hurricane approached, Gov. Ron DeSantis said. “Numerous counties have reported tornado damage,” he said.

Heavy rain and extreme wind warning will continue for all areas north of Sarasota, contributing to wind gust up to 96 mph.

The storm will move through central Florida throughout the next several hours. Orlando could get wind gusts up to 80 mph.

The rain will become a huge issue near Tampa as flash flood warnings continue for the entire region, which could get 10 inches.

The eye of Hurricane Milton is passing over Sarasota, leaving an eerie quiet before the rest of the storm slams this coastal area. There are even birds chirping.

Luckily for people in Fort Myers, Milton is not quite “as bad as we anticipated,” Mayor Kevin Anderson told NBC News live just minutes after he lost power and nearly 30 minutes after Milton made landfall near Siesta Key, about 75 miles north of Fort Myers.

Anderson said there are a “little bit of wind gusts, some light rain.”

The city was victim of a number of tornadoes earlier today, which “definitely caught us off-guard,” Anderson said. “We weren’t expecting to have so many of them, let alone one, but luckily they weren’t too bad.”

Anderson said that “a majority, more than usual,” of people in Fort Myers listened to evacuation warnings and that downtown businesses were boarded up — something they hadn’t done in the past.

There were 779,850 power customers without electricity across Florida at around 9 tonight, according to the outage tracking website poweroutage.us.

Some of the counties with power outages are on the Atlantic Coast. Hurricane Milton made landfall near Siesta Key on the Gulf Coast around 8:30 p.m.

The storm has a wide impact, and tropical storm-force winds extended up to 225 miles from its center, the National Hurricane Center said. Hurricane-force winds extended outward up to 35 miles from the center, it said shortly before landfall.

Water is steadily rising here in downtown Fort Myers. There’s a solid foot or two of water running down the street.

Hurricane Milton has made landfall near Siesta Key, the National Hurricane Center said at 8:30 p.m.

The eye wall of the huge storm earlier began moving onshore near Tampa and St. Petersburg. Life-threatening rain, storm surge and wind all preceded the landfall of the center and will continue, the National Hurricane Center said.

Siesta Key is a barrier island adjacent to Sarasota. The storm made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 120 mph, the agency said.

The federal government approved an emergency declaration ahead of Milton’s making landfall, with “thousands of federal personnel on the ground” ready to respond, Biden said.

At a briefing, Biden said that at his direction, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin “prepositioned” search-and-rescue teams, helicopters and high-speed water vehicles “as close to the storm as possible so they’re ready to conduct life-saving missions.”

The director of FEMA will also be in Florida’s emergency operations center, and the federal government has 20 million meals and 40 million liters of water at the ready, Biden said.

Hurricane Milton “still carries incredible destructiveness, can wipe out communities and cause loss of life,” Biden said.

The storm surge is still expected to be up to 13 feet, he said in a news briefing, urging people to listen to local officials and follow all their safety instructions.