On Heels of Helene, Milton Explodes Into Category 5 Hurricane

"This is not normal," said climate advocates Monday as they expressed the same shock as weather experts who were reporting on the rapid strengthening of Hurricane Milton, whose winds sped up to 175 miles per hour as Florida residents struggled to recover from last month's devastating storm, Helene.

Milton was classified as a Category 5 hurricane Monday afternoon—just five hours after it had been designated a Category 2 storm with 100 mile-per-hour winds and 48 hours after it became a tropical storm churning eastward over the Gulf of Mexico.

The winds "explosively" intensified over a matter of hours, according to the National Hurricane Center.

As the hurricane gathered strength, weather analyst Colin McCarthy of U.S. Stormwatch said that "not a single weather model predicted the storm would strengthen this quickly."

The storm was expected to make landfall on Florida's Gulf Coast on Wednesday, and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis—who vehemently denies scientists' consensus that human-caused climate change is causing more extreme weather—called for widespread evacuations ahead of "life-threatening" hazards.

"If we knew exactly where it's going to hit, we probably would evacuate fewer people," DeSantis said Monday morning. "But we don't know that."

President Joe Biden declared an emergency in Florida Monday afternoon and ordered federal assistance to the state.

The New York Times reported that Milton could weaken before Wednesday as it makes its way through the Gulf, but that could be accompanied by a widening of the hurricane's size, threatening a greater portion of the vulnerable state.

"The entire peninsula, the entire west coast, has potential to have major, major impact because of the storm surge," said DeSantis on Sunday.

Milton is expected to be the second hurricane to hit Florida in two weeks, with parts of the state still reeling from the damage left by Helene.

DeSantis said Monday that emergency workers had picked up 180,000 cubic yards of debris across the state, and said, "There's still a lot of it."

The Tampa Bay area, where residents were warned by National Weather Service meteorologist Rick Davis on Monday that Milton could be "the worst hurricane in their lifetime," was inundated last month with record-high storm surges.

Barrier islands were damaged by Helene, and the destruction of sand dunes has left the area especially exposed to hazards, Davis told The New York Times.

"Just after our latest hurricane, we are extremely vulnerable, especially to surge," said Davis. "Our ground is extremely saturated from several hurricanes already this year, and we're going to have river flooding. So people that may be 20 miles inland from the coast won't get storm surge, but they could get rainfall flooding, river flooding, retention ponds could flood creeks."

Climatologists have warned that warmer oceans and bodies of water including the Gulf of Mexico are likely to cause more intense hurricane seasons. The Gulf has reached an average surface temperature of nearly 90°F—the hottest it's been since modern records have been kept, Brian McNoldy, a climate researcher at the University of Miami, toldVox in August.

"The Gulf of Mexico is so warm that the models couldn't predict how strong Milton has gotten so quickly," said national climate advocacy group Sunrise Movement.

Officials called on residents to evacuate Monday rather than waiting for the hurricane to get closer to making its expected landfall. More than a dozen school districts in the state announced they were closing ahead of the storm.

But as pro-labor media group More Perfect Union reported, workers on Monday were already sharing stories online of how companies are planning to stay open until at least Tuesday night, making it impossible for people to obey evacuation orders.

One person working in retail management said that "after waiting all weekend to see if the corporate overlords would say we're closed until further notice, I got notice today that we're business as usual until Tuesday night... This gives me no time to evacuate or prepare accordingly."

"Workers died during Hurricane Helene because they weren't given time to evacuate," said More Perfect Union. "This must stop."