TAMPA—Millions of displaced evacuees are bunkered inland, and more than 50,000 electrical linemen, 34 search-and-rescue teams, thousands of National Guard, law enforcement officers, and first responders from more than 20 states are entrenched, poised to face a monster unlike any seen in Florida for decades.
As of mid-afternoon Wednesday, the outer bands of Hurricane Milton were battering Central Florida with increasingly heavy rains and thunderstorms sprouting strings of tornado alerts, the opening salvoes of a what will be a long night’s journey to a day that dawns on a violently reshaped landscape.
Milton at 4 p.m. was a Category 3 hurricane with maximum sustained wind speeds of 125 miles per hour. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) expects Milton to make landfall as an “extremely dangerous major hurricane” sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight somewhere in southern Sarasota County, about 40 miles south of Tampa Bay….