TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Hurricane Milton crashed into Florida as a Category 3 storm Wednesday, pounding the coast with ferocious winds of over 100 mph (160 kph), heavy rain and producing a series of tornadoes around the state. Tampa avoided a direct hit.
The cyclone had maximum sustained winds of 120 mph (205 kph) as it made landfall at 8:30 p.m. near Siesta Key, the National Hurricane Center said. Siesta Key is a prosperous strip of white-sand beaches home to 5,500 people about 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of Tampa.
More than 1.5 million homes and businesses were without power Wednesday night in Florida, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports. The highest number of outages were in Hardee County, as well as neighboring Sarasota and Manatee counties.
Before Milton even made landfall, tornados were touching down across the state. The Spanish Lakes Country Club near Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, was hit particularly hard, with homes destroyed and some residents killed.
“We have lost some life,” St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson told WPBF News, though he wouldn’t say how many people were killed.
The Tampa Bay area has not taken a direct hit from a major hurricane in more than a century, but the storm was still bringing a potentially deadly storm surge to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast, including densely populated areas such as Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota and Fort Myers.
The National Weather Service said flash flooding was occurring in the Tampa Bay area, including St. Petersburg, where over 16 inches (41 centimeters) of rain had fallen.
Heavy rains were also likely to cause flooding inland along rivers and lakes as Milton traverses the Florida Peninsula as a hurricane, eventually to emerge in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday.
About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane even made landfall, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, said Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
About 90 minutes after making landfall, Milton was centered about 20 miles (30 kilometers) northeast of Sarasota and had weakened slightly with maximum sustained winds of 110 mph (175 kph), becoming a Category 2 storm, the hurricane center reported. It was moving east-northeast at 16 mph (26 kph).
Milton slammed into a Florida region still reeling from Hurricane Helene, which caused heavy damage to beach communities with storm surge and killed a dozen people in seaside Pinellas County alone.
Earlier, officials issued dire warnings to flee or face grim odds of survival.
“This is it, folks,” said Cathie Perkins, emergency management director in Pinellas County, which sits on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay. “Those of you who were punched during Hurricane Helene, this is going to be a knockout. You need to get out, and you need to get out now.”
By late afternoon, some officials said the time had passed for such efforts, suggesting that people who stayed behind hunker down instead. By the evening, some counties announced they had suspended emergency services.
Milton was expected to remain a hurricane as it plowed across the state, including the heavily populated Orlando area, through Thursday.