A Florida man has refused to evacuate his boat in Tampa Bay as Hurricane Milton barrels onwards with fears of a 15ft storm surge.
The Category 5 storm is set to collide with Florida's West Coast on Wednesday night. Jay, an amputee, lives on the boat and has said the engine doesn't work so he can't move it to safety.
He is nicknamed Lieutenant Dan, after the amputee from blockbuster film Forrest Gump who rides out a storm. “I know that God didn’t bring me this far for something to happen to me ,” Jay said in a video of an interview with the Weather Channel. He previously weathered the Hurricane Helene which hit the state at the end of September.
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“The more you go through it, the more you learn,” Jay told the reporter. “I’m confident in my ability to ride it out unless it turns into a Wizard of Oz-type situation, and I wind up in Kansas.” At the end of the interview he told the reporter: "I’ll be here. I’ll see you Friday."
The Tampa Bay area, home to more than 3.3 million people, faced the possibility of widespread destruction after avoiding direct hits from major hurricanes for more than a century. The National Hurricane Center predicted Milton, a monstrous Category 5 hurricane during much of its approach, would likely weaken but remain a major hurricane when it makes landfall late Wednesday.
Milton was centered early Wednesday about 360 miles (580 kilometers) southwest of Tampa with maximum sustained winds of 160 mph (260 kmh), the National Hurricane Center reported.
Forecasters predicted the storm will retain hurricane strength as it crosses central Florida on Thursday on a path east toward the Atlantic Ocean. The hurricane’s precise track remained uncertain, as forecasters Tuesday evening nudged its projected path slightly south of Tampa.
Thousands of fleeing cars clogged Florida’s highways ahead of the storm, but time for evacuations was running out Wednesday. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor noted that up to 15 feet (4.5 meters) of storm surge forecast for her city would be deep enough to swallow an entire house.
“So if you’re in it, basically that’s the coffin that you’re in,” Castor said. "This is literally catastrophic, and I can say without dramatization whatsoever — if you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you're gonna die," Castor told CNN in an interview earlier in the week.
Milton shocked meteorologists after it rapidly intensified from a Tropical Storm that formed over the weekend into a powerful Category 5 hurricane in a matter of days — one of the most rapid intensification of a storm that's ever been seen, according to some experts.
"Anyone who was born and raised in the Tampa Bay area has never seen anything like this," Castor added in the CNN interview. Evacuation orders are in place for the entire region as well, but some are stubbornly refusing to leave. Others simply can't — there's no gas left, or they simply can't afford to leave.
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