Hurricane Milton Bears Down on Florida’s Tampa Area With House-Toppling Winds

Hurricane Milton is closing in on Florida’s west coast, packing torrential rainfall and a destructive storm surge that could inundate some of the state’s fastest-growing counties.

Milton was 50 miles (80 kilometers) west-southwest of Sarasota at 6 p.m. Wednesday, according to an update from the U.S. National Hurricane Center. Vertical wind shear over the Gulf of Mexico has knocked back Milton’s top winds to 120 mph (193 kph), leaving it a tree-snapping Category 3 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.

Heavy rains from the storm’s outer bands pounded central Florida for much of Wednesday, and nearly 270,000 homes and businesses are already without power, according to PowerOutage.us. The hurricane center forecast landfall this evening, near or just south of Tampa Bay.