By Julio-Cesar Chavez and Evan Garcia
TAMPA, Florida (Reuters) -Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida's battered Gulf Coast as an enormous Category 5 storm on Tuesday, triggering massive traffic jams and fuel shortages as officials ordered more than 1 million people to flee before it slams into the Tampa Bay area.
Milton, which exploded on Monday into one of the most intense Atlantic hurricanes on record, was forecast to make landfall late Wednesday or early Thursday, threatening a stretch of Florida's densely populated west coast that is still reeling from the devastating Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago.
A direct hit on the bay would be the first since 1921, when the now-sprawling Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area was a relative backwater. Today it is home to more than 3 million people.
Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned people against riding out the storm, calling Helene a mere wakeup call.
"If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you're going to die," Castor said.
In Tampa, Estephani Veliz Hernandez said she and her family were collecting their pets, important documents and their cash before heading to a relative's home further inland.
"We're leaving everything behind. We're just trying to get to safety," she said. "If anything happens - if God says here you go - we're all together at least."
Milton packed maximum sustained winds of 165 mph (270 kph), the U.S. National Hurricane Center said, putting it at the highest level on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.
At 7 p.m. CDT (0000 GMT), the eye of the storm was 440 miles (710 km) southwest of Tampa, moving east-northeast at 10 mph (17 kph).
"Milton's wind field is expected to expand as it approaches Florida. In fact, the official forecast shows the hurricane and tropical-storm-force winds roughly doubling in size by the time it makes landfall," the hurricane center said.
The greater size also enlarges the scope of the risk of storm surge to hundreds of miles (kilometers) of coastline. The hurricane center sees surges of 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 meters) north and south of Tampa Bay, in addition to the ferocious winds and risk of inland flash flooding from intense rainfall.
About 2.8% of U.S. gross domestic product is in the direct path of Milton, Ryan Sweet, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, wrote on Tuesday. Airlines, energy firms and a Universal Studios theme park were among the companies beginning to halt their Florida operations as they braced for disruptions.
Hurricane Helene left the Tampa Bay area more vulnerable when it hit the Gulf Coast's barrier islands and beaches on Sept. 26, sweeping away tons of sand, knocking down dunes and blowing away dune grass, said Isaac Longley, a meteorologist with the commercial forecasting company AccuWeather.
Five-thousand National Guard members have been deployed, with another 3,000 on hand for the storm's aftermath, Governor Ron DeSantis said.
President Joe Biden, who postponed an overseas trip to supervise the storm response, urged those under evacuation orders to leave immediately, saying it was a matter of life and death.
WON'T BE FOOLED AGAIN
More than a dozen coastal counties issued mandatory evacuation orders, including Tampa's Hillsborough County. Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, ordered the evacuation of more than 500,000 people. Lee County said 416,000 people lived in its mandatory evacuation zones.
Mobile homes, nursing homes and assisted living facilities also faced mandatory evacuation.
In Fort Myers, mobile home-dweller Jamie Watts and his wife took refuge in a hotel after losing their previous trailer to Hurricane Ian in 2022.
"My wife's happy. We're not in that tin can," Watts said.
"We stayed during Ian and literally watched my roof tear off my house and it put a turmoil in us. So this time I'm going to be a little safer," he said.
Motorists waited to fill their tanks in lines snaking around gas stations, only to find that some were out of fuel. State police provided escorts to fuel trucks replenishing gas stations, DeSantis said.
By early Tuesday, bumper-to-bumper traffic choked roads leading out of Tampa.
Musician Mark Feinman, 38, said it took 13 hours to drive his family 500 miles (805 km) from St. Petersburg to Pensacola. Some drivers sped through breakdown lanes and across grass medians to cut ahead, causing accidents, he said.
About 17% of Florida's nearly 8,000 gas stations had run out of fuel by late Tuesday, according to markets tracker GasBuddy.
Fueled by warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Milton became the third-fastest intensifying storm on record in the Atlantic.
It had weakened to a Category 4 hurricane on Tuesday but regained strength. Milton is forecast to remain an extremely dangerous hurricane after landfall in Florida, causing catastrophic damage and power outages expected to last days.
The storm already caused some havoc in Mexico, but Governor Joaquin Diaz Mena of Yucatan state said much of the damage reported so far had been minor. Thousands of utility customers lost power.
Relief efforts are still under way throughout much of the U.S. Southeast in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which killed more than 200 people across six states and caused billions of dollars in damage.