As Milton swooped east across Florida overnight, people in the state’s inland counties were seeking shelter from hurricane-force winds and preparing for possible floods or tornadoes.
“It’s not a good situation right now,” said Monty Askari, who was working the night shift at a Howard Johnson hotel in Lakeland, about 35 miles east of Tampa along Interstate 4. “Because of the storm we are completely sold out.”
Hurricanes that hit Florida’s Gulf Coast often weaken after landfall, and Milton did drop to a Category 2 storm a little over an hour after it crashed ashore as a Category 3. But while some hurricanes don’t post much of an inland threat after landfall, Milton packed so much force that it remained very dangerous as it passed over land.
As dawn neared on Thursday, it was a strong Category 1 hurricane whipping inland counties with sustained winds of more than 80 miles per hour. There were reports of more than two dozen tornadoes across the state as of late Wednesday.
Such winds are strong enough to snap large tree branches, topple power lines and damage the roofs of even well-constructed homes. While Gulf Coast counties accounted for many of Florida’s nearly three million power outages early Thursday morning, hundreds of thousands were in central and eastern counties.
“We’re currently in the thick of it,” Bill Litton, the emergency management director for Osceola County, south of Orlando in Central Florida, said by phone after midnight.
High winds were the primary concern, he added, along with an expected six to eight inches of rain in some areas and possible flooding in low-lying parts of the state. A flash flood warning was in effect for parts of the county until 6 a.m.
Over 1,400 people had voluntarily moved into emergency shelters in Osceola County as of early Thursday, Mr. Litton said. Most of the county’s emergency medical workers had been temporarily grounded for safety because wind speeds were over 45 m.p.h., he added.
Nearly 30,000 of Osceola County’s more than 200,000 electricity customers had no power as of 4 a.m. local time, according to the tracking site poweroutage.us.
In neighboring Polk County, an inland county closer to the Gulf Coast, nearly 50 percent of the roughly 380,000 electricity customers had lost power. At least 20 emergency shelters were open there, and the authorities warned that heavy rainfall could lead to possible sewer overflows.
“Now is the time to hunker down,” Paul Womble, the county’s emergency management director, told reporters as Milton approached Polk County on Wednesday afternoon. “It’s not safe, and the strongest part of the storm is not here.”
In Lakeland, a city of 120,000 people in Polk County, Mr. Askari said by phone from the Howard Johnson hotel early Thursday that wasn’t sure what the conditions were like outside. He had been sheltering at the hotel since his last night shift.
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