Write your name in permanent marker on your arm. That’s the advice one Florida official gave residents planning to defy evacuation orders as yet another life-threatening hurricane barrels toward the state’s west coast. “So that people know who you are when they get to you afterwards,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) said at a press conference today with Republican Sen. Rick Scott. Hurricane Milton, which has quickly grown into a Category 5 storm with 180 mph winds, is expected to crash into the Florida Gulf Coast as early as Wednesday night, hitting some of the same communities devastated less than two weeks ago by Hurricane Helene. Even worse, it’s threatening a direct strike on Tampa Bay, perhaps the nation’s most vulnerable community when it comes to storm surge — where 3.5 million people live near a body of water that hasn’t suffered a major hurricane since 1921. Disaster planners have literally based apocalyptic scenarios on this kind of landfall. Whatever Milton does, Florida is facing a huge challenge as communities up and down the coast evacuate. The one-two punch is driving home the risks of rapidly warming oceans, which act as rocket fuel for tropical cyclones. Milton is one of the fastest intensifying storms on record in the Atlantic, while Helene was unusually large, stretching hundreds of miles across. The back-to-back storms almost certainly won’t be the last hurricanes to break records, as the world continues to release planet-warming emissions into the atmosphere (primarily by burning fossil fuels). Last year set a new annual record for global ocean heat — not to mention global temperatures. The devastation is testing Florida’s recovery efforts. The linemen who helped restore electricity after Helene struck have since left for other hard-hit areas — and now utility companies are bringing in crews from as far away as Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The impending hurricane is also putting a spotlight on the nation’s dwindling disaster relief accounts. The Biden administration says the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund has the money it needs to support recovery from both Helene and Milton. But officials have sounded the alarm about the fund’s solvency through the end of the hurricane season in November, writes Andres Picon. A bipartisan group of lawmakers has begun calling on Congress to reconvene in order to pass supplemental disaster funds, which lawmakers failed to do in the stopgap government funding bill that passed before Helene hit. Two of those states — Georgia and North Carolina — are key battlegrounds for the upcoming presidential election. Election officials are racing to ensure residents can safely cast their votes next month, write John Sakellariadis, Liz Crampton and Jessica Piper.
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