Milton’s impacts still keep coming, and will be for weeks. Tampa dodged the potential catastrophic storm surge, but nearby Pasco County was among (already-saturated before Milton) communities drenched with huge rain totals, and the water will take weeks to work thru the river system.
Two local news reports here about communities taken by surprise – “I’ve never seen anything like this”, and “no one was expecting this”, being prominent reactions. Also, “It will be hard to come back from this.”
People have a hard time understanding delayed responses in large-scale natural systems, and may resort to conspiracy theories or blame disinformation to help explain things. The analogies I use because people are more familiar with them are:
– The hottest part of the day is well beyond high noon.
– The hottest/coldest part of the year is after the solstices.
(In this case, a hydrogeologist may balk at these analogies because of the highly variable groundwater setting, but I still think it’s useful to give people a more familiar conundrum to wrap their heads around.)