Hurricane Milton, one of the strongest storm systems ever, is barreling toward Florida and could cause economic damage that could take months to recover from.
Milton, a deadly Category 4 hurricane as of Tuesday morning, is set to make landfall somewhere along Florida's Gulf Coast later this week. If the models and forecasts hold, it would be a historic impact. The new storm comes just days after Hurricane Helene punched through Florida and overwhelmed the southeastern United States.
The two storms could make the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season one of the costliest and most disruptive. CoreLogic estimates that Helene caused between $30.5 billion and $47.5 billion in damage to over a dozen states. That is about 10 times the total damage caused last year from all combined tropical storms and hurricanes.
Now, Tampa and southwestern Florida are in the crosshairs.
Jon Davis, chief meteorologist for supply chain risk management software company Everstream Analytics, said Milton was shaping up to be highly unusual by historical standards. Usually, hurricanes of this magnitude tend to move east to west, but this massive system formed in the western Gulf of Mexico and is moving east toward Florida.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” Davis said during an interview with the Washington Examiner. “And the bottom line is that that is part of the high risk for those areas of the West Coast, especially Tampa Bay.”
How much economic ruin Milton will cause will depend upon where exactly it makes landfall. The Tampa area has not taken a direct hit in over 100 years, and since that time, it has become one of the most populous regions in the Sunshine State, meaning the likelihood of an enormous economic hit is high.
“This is the kind of storm that the impacts are not going to be measured in days, but the impacts are going to be measured in weeks, if not months,” Davis said. “So this is a long-term situation overall.”
Amir Neto, director of the Regional Economic Research Center at Florida Gulf Coast University, emphasized to the Washington Examiner that while other parts of western Florida have been lashed by hurricanes over the years and have had to be rebuilt, Tampa has not been hit in over a century. Because of that, a powerful storm going over Tampa could be particularly destructive.
“So if we think about Tampa, that has not been hit directly for what over 100 years now, [the] inventory of houses and the building codes are completely different,” he said.
It is still very early to project just how much damage the hurricane might cause, but Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler at Enki Research, told Bloomberg that the average estimate right now is about $35 billion.
A major concern any time a hurricane spins out in the Gulf of Mexico is that damage could be done to oil wells and energy facilities located off the coast of Florida. Davis said that if Milton stays on its current course, it will avoid the heart of those oil fields, although it will affect the far southern and far eastern edges of the energy zone.
Davis said some of the southern and eastern offshore operations will be closing down and shuttering oil and natural gas production over the next couple of days.
“But if it would have been further north and taking this west-to-east track across the Gulf further north, it would have basically shut down the entire Gulf of Mexico,” Davis said, adding that the supply that is going to be shut down is not going to be “really dramatic.”
While the effects on the supply side aren’t expected to be massive, there could be pressure on the demand side of the equation. If Milton tears through Tampa and central Florida, there will be many power disruptions across the state.
Central Florida is also an agriculture hub, and if Milton’s track holds up, it could devastate the crops there. Davis said the biggest crop of concern is citrus. Florida is known for its production of oranges. Because harvest happens later in the fall, there could be production loss.
“So you have losses for production of the current crop,” Davis said. “You also have tree damage. And when you tend to have tree damage, then you tend to see production loss for many years.”
Tourism will also be affected if Milton remains on its current path. Hurricane Ian was the last major hurricane to slam into southwestern Florida in 2022. It made landfall near Fort Myers, which is less populated than the Tampa-St. Petersburg metropolitan area, the state's second most-populated metro area.
Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel, two major tourist areas, had 35% of their $11.4 billion in assessed property value “vaporized” by Ian, according to the University of Florida. Year over year, county tourist development taxes fell nearly 47%, according to Lee County, where Fort Myers is located.
Milton’s track also goes right near Orlando, one of the biggest tourism hubs in the country. Theme parks, including Disney World and Universal Studios, bring millions of visitors to the state each year and, in turn, generate massive amounts of revenue for the region. Depending on the damage, it could be a significant setback for Florida’s overall tourism industry.
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Neto also noted that there is a lot of manufacturing located on the Interstate 4 corridor in central Florida and said factories might be affected by the powerful hurricane.
As of Tuesday morning, Milton was a powerful Category 4 hurricane after being downgraded from a Catagory 5 Hurricane that packed maximum sustained winds of 180 mph. Only a few storms have ever matched Milton’s strength. Hurricane warnings have been announced for much of Florida's Gulf Coast as mandatory evacuations are underway.
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