Multiple tornadoes were spotted in Florida as a weakening but still tremendously powerful Hurricane Milton slammed into the state’s west coast on Wednesday night, arriving as a category 3 storm and leaving more than 2m homes without power. The cyclone, described earlier in the day by Joe Biden as 'the storm of the century', made landfall near Sarasota, Florida, just after 8.30pm ET, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. It brought a deadly storm surge to much of Florida’s Gulf coast, including densely populated areas such as Tampa, St Petersburg, Sarasota and Fort Myers. Despite losing some of its potency to wind shear as it neared the coast, Milton, which had churned in the Gulf of Mexico over the last two days as a category 5 storm, was still one of the strongest hurricanes to strike the US mainland in recent memory

Source: The Guardian October 10, 2024 14:37 UTC