What Makes Tampa So Vulnerable to Milton?

12 miles is the difference between a 100 billion, and a 200 billion dollar storm.
Tampa Bay is uniquely vulnerable, and has had a long streak of luck. Meanwhile, the city has developed into a major metro area.

Clip above is from WFLA-Tampa Chief Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli.

Washington Post:

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.

An extraordinary amount of lightning within Hurricane Milton's eye wall this morning.

Milton is now a powerful, Category 4 storm. pic.twitter.com/REcyx7PlwA

— CIRA (@CIRA_CSU) October 7, 2024

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.
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“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.