Tampa, And 235,000 Commercial Properties, Face Down A Once-In-A-Century Storm
Hurricane Milton, one of the Atlantic’s strongest-ever storms, is inching its way across the Gulf of Mexico Tuesday night, threatening Florida’s western coast with potentially historic devastation.
Milton is positioned to make direct landfall in the Tampa Bay region in the early morning hours Thursday, with damaging winds and a deluge of more than a foot of rain that could inundate the city’s urban core with a deadly storm surge as high as 15 feet.
Milton’s expected path makes it likely to be the first hurricane to directly strike Tampa since October 1921, when a Category 4 storm brought 11 feet of storm surge and upended the local economy.
“If Milton stays on its course this will be the most powerful hurricane to hit Tampa Bay in over 100 years,” the National Weather Service’s Tampa Bay account said on the social media platform X. “No one in the area has ever experienced a hurricane this strong before."
Storm surge could reach similar levels in St. Petersburg, just west of Tampa, where the streets are still filled with debris from Hurricane Helene’s grazing of the city just two weeks ago. Fort Myers, which is still recovering from the $112B in damage wrought by Hurricane Ian in September 2022, is facing coastal inundation up to 10 feet.
Current situation in the Tampa / St. Pete area as Hurricane Milton approaches. Debris and belongings line the streets from Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago. Crews are working fast to remove it all as we brace for what could be the first major hurricane to hit Tampa in… pic.twitter.com/9cyIWn0nrb
— Rob - Underworld (@Underworld5s) October 7, 2024
City officials in St. Petersburg issued a public safety advisory regarding four cranes at construction projects that would remain in place throughout the storm. It was infeasible to lower the cranes ahead of the storm given time constraints, so city officials instead suggested that people near the downtown construction sites relocate in case of a crane failure.
Roughly 235,000 commercial properties are in the direct path of the hurricane, Moody’s estimates.
Tampa, Florida’s third-largest city with more than 3 million residents in its metro area, has roughly 46M SF of Class-A and Class-B office space and 198M SF of industrial space, according to Avison Young.
The city became a popular destination for pandemic-era relocations, spurring record multifamily development. Total housing inventory has grown nearly 3% in the 12 months that ended in March, and the first quarter saw the delivery of 3,200 new apartments, the highest level since at least 2000, according to Marcus & Millichap.
The region is home to properties backed by $16.2B worth of CMBS loans, according to Trepp. Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a Tuesday briefing that the state was expecting the storm to cause significant damage to Port Tampa Bay.
Patty Nooney, who oversees Avison Young’s property management operations in Florida, spent the last couple of days preparing her properties across the state, including closing down and securing office buildings inside the mandatory evacuation zone that envelopes Downtown Tampa.
After a busy few days coordinating with her staff from her office in Boca Raton, Nooney said all of her properties are prepared for the storm to make landfall. Now, she waits.
“It’s one foot on the gas, one on the brakes,” she said. “It's unnerving because once you've done everything you can, you're forced to sit and wait.”
While Tampa is expected to face the worst impacts from the storm, some models predict Milton will head further south and instead slam into Fort Myers. Regardless of where it makes landfall, the storm is expected to lead to severe flooding in both cities as well as deep into the state.
The storm is expected to weaken but remain a hurricane as it drifts over Orlando and exits Florida’s eastern coast somewhere south of Jacksonville. The majority of the state is facing at least a 40% risk of flash flooding in the next three days, with the risk around Tampa and Orlando exceeding 70%.
8PM EDT: This is nothing short of astronomical. I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe you the storms small eye and intensity. 897mb pressure with 180 MPH max sustained winds and gusts 200+ MPH. This is now the 4th strongest hurricane ever recorded by pressure on… pic.twitter.com/QFdqFYFI7o
— Noah Bergren (@NbergWX) October 8, 2024
Mandatory evacuations are in effect across parts of at least seven Florida counties, from Citrus County in the north down to Sarasota County. DeSantis has declared a state of emergency in 51 of Florida’s 67 counties.
DeSantis said Tuesday that the state plans to deploy 8,000 members of the National Guard for disaster response and recovery before landfall and is staging over 37,000 linemen to restore power after expected widespread outages.
“Let’s prepare for the worst, and let’s pray that we get a weakening and hope for the least amount of damage as possible,” DeSantis said during the Tuesday briefing. “But we must be prepared for a major, major impact to the west coast of Florida.”
Milton isn’t expected to have widespread impacts outside of Florida, in stark contrast to Hurricane Helene, which briefly battered the state’s Big Bend region before charging deep inland and bringing severe flooding to Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.
Entire towns in western North Carolina were wiped out by Helene, and the popular tourist town of Asheville is still assessing the storm’s toll. Helene killed at least 227 people across the country.
Milton, like Helene, underwent a rapid intensification as it formed in the unusually warm Gulf waters this week. The storm has vacillated between a Category 4 and Category 5 off the coast, reaching the latter as of Tuesday evening with peak wind speeds of 165 miles per hour.
It is expected to weaken ahead of landfall but will slam the coast as at least a Category 3 storm with winds exceeding 111 miles per hour.
The state’s highways are clogged with evacuees fleeing the storm’s path after preparing their homes for what could be a historic deluge. With the storm’s path largely set, there’s little else they can do.
“We're all just in that holding pattern where we're all going to pray it dissipates,” Nooney said. “But it really looks like we're going to get hit pretty bad on this one.”
