Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Hurricane Milton ploughed across Florida on Thursday after slamming into the state’s western coast overnight, bringing life-threatening storm surges and leaving millions without power.
The hurricane was preceded by a spate of tornadoes and made landfall near Siesta Key in Sarasota County as a category three storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds of 120mph, the US National Hurricane Center said.
By early Thursday, wind speeds reduced to 90mph, dropping Milton to a category one hurricane as it crossed central Florida towards the Atlantic Ocean.
The National Hurricane Center suspended alerts for the west coast by 5am local time, but said that warnings still remained in place for the east coast of Florida. Milton was expected to move away from Florida to north of the Bahamas by the evening as a powerful extratropical low, it said.
More than 3mn homes and businesses were without power in Florida by 5am on Thursday, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks utility reports across the US.
At least two people were killed in St Lucie County, NBC reported. These were reported to be related to the multiple tornadoes that preceded the hurricane.
The storm passed near Cape Canaveral, near launch pads used by Nasa and companies including SpaceX, and prompted the delay of a planned launch of the Europa Clipper mission to examine Jupiter’s Europa moon.
Milton is the second hurricane to hit the southern US in a fortnight. It comes after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across several south-eastern states, killing more than 225 people and destroying roads across western North Carolina.
Insurance losses from Hurricane Milton were uncertain but early estimates put the damage at up to $60bn, with analysts warning the US’s 2024 hurricane season will “dent” insurers’ profitability.
Credit rating agency Morningstar DBRS warned that accumulation of losses over the 2024 hurricane season, which runs until the end of November, would “likely make a dent in insurers’ profitability”, particularly for those with “significant exposures to personal lines in Florida”.
While south-east Florida has long been seen as a high-risk area for hurricanes, insurers considered the northern part of the state as a more attractive place to write policies, said Oscar Seikaly, chief executive of NSI Insurance, a Miami-based group.
“Insurers have been balancing their business by writing lots of policies up north, which historically was pretty safe — until recently,” he said.
Seikaly added the potential damage in the area, where many houses are not built to withstand major storm events, could be severe. “There are still frame houses and those are the ones that fly if you have a tropical storm,” he said.
Before Milton made landfall, DeSantis said 6,000 members of the Florida National Guard and 3,000 from other states were standing ready to respond to its aftermath.
“This is the largest Florida National Guard search and rescue mobilisation in the entire history of the state of Florida,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday criticised Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for leading an “onslaught of lies” about the US government’s response to the storm.
Trump has sought to politicise both Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton by accusing the Biden administration of not doing enough to help communities hit by the storms. He has also spread false information about the amount of financial aid available to people fleeing disaster areas.
“For the last few weeks, there’s been a reckless, irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies that are disturbing people,” said Biden. “It’s undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been taken and will continue to be taken. It’s harmful to those who need help the most.”
An independent group of climate scientists said human-caused climate change had boosted Hurricane Helene’s devastating rainfall by about 10 per cent and intensified its winds by about 11 per cent.
Global warming from the burning of fossil fuels had made the high sea temperatures that fuelled the storm 200 to 500 times more likely, the World Weather Attribution group found in a new report.
Read the full article here