Hurricane Ian rapidly gained strength — with winds reaching 250km/h — as it barrelled towards the coast of Florida, threatening to rip roofs off homes, wreck agricultural crops and cripple infrastructure.
Ian’s winds are just 3km/h away from reaching category 5 strength, the most powerful rating for a storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, according to the US National Hurricane Centre. Only four category 5 hurricanes have hit mainland US in records going back to 1851. The storm was expected to make landfall along the west coast of Florida late on Wednesday.
“Catastrophic wind damage is likely where the core of Ian moves on shore,” Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist, said. “Widespread, life-threatening, catastrophic flash, urban, and river flooding is expected across central Florida.”
The storm is bearing down on Florida as climate change fuels extreme weather around the globe. The year has already brought deadly flooding in Kentucky, a European heatwave that killed more than 2,000 people in Portugal and Spain, and a hurricane that left catastrophic damage from Puerto Rico to Atlantic Canada — each disaster exacting its own human and financial toll.
Ian was forecast to inflict more than $45bn in damage, which would rank it among the top 10 most expensive storms in US history. By late Tuesday, more than 2,000 flights to and from Florida were cancelled, and more than 2-million people had been urged to evacuate.
Across the US, 3,465 flights have been cancelled for Wednesday and Thursday, with most of those to or from Orlando, Tampa, and Miami, according to FlightAware, an airline tracking service.
Ian will rip right through Florida’s citrus groves, potentially knocking ripe fruit off trees and ruining the crop, Maxar Technologies meteorologist Donald Keeney said. Ian’s path is likely to take it back into the Atlantic on the eastern side of Florida before it makes a second landfall as a much weaker storm on the coast of Georgia or South Carolina.
If Ian maintains its strength as it comes ashore, it will be the first category 4 storm to hit the US since Hurricane Ida in 2021. Ida, however, hit a sparsely populated area of Louisiana, while Ian is taking aim at a denser part of the nation. Like Ida, Ian’s true danger may lie in heavy rain across Florida and the US Southeast.
Three of the four category 5 storms that have hit the mainland US came ashore in Florida. Hurricane Michael was the last category 5 storm to hit the mainland, striking the Florida Panhandle in 2018.
Bloomberg
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