John Morales, a veteran meteorologist in South Florida, hadn’t slept much. The N.F.L.’s “Sunday Night Football” game on October 6th, between the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers, was delayed owing to lightning, and ran late, so he didn’t go on air with his forecast until 1 A.M. He was tracking a Category 1 hurricane that had formed in the western Gulf of Mexico the previous day, and calmly reported its projected track. He then slept for about four hours. As he prepared to go on air again, at noon, he received an urgent bulletin from the National Hurricane Center. The storm was now a Category 5.
When the broadcast began, he wasn’t facing the camera because he was still analyzing the data. When he glanced up, he looked stricken. “Just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” he said. “It has dropped fifty millibars in ten hours.” He paused, clearly trying to collect himself. To Morales, a barometric pressure drop that fast meant an extreme, record-breaking intensification of the hurricane; it had turned into a monster. Morales was suddenly overcome, on the verge of tears. His voice quivering, he continued, “I apologize. This is just horrific.”
If you haven’t heard of Morales, then it’s likely that you missed the Hurricane Milton coverage entirely. His broadcast, which he hesitantly posted on X, went viral, and has now been seen nearly two million times. Morales became the unlikely center of a media blitz, appearing on the front page of newspapers, and on prime-time television news all over the world. Known to South Floridians as a calm, comforting presence onscreen, Morales had been connecting extreme weather to climate change for two decades, but he had always maintained a neutral, restrained style. All that went out the window with Milton. It may have been unplanned, but, by letting his emotions show, he became America’s weatherman.
Floridians are accustomed to hurricanes, weary of storms to the point that many are relatively nonchalant about a big storm’s approach. Some even ignore mandatory evacuation orders. But the Morales clip got people’s attention. Some evacuees told interviewers, or commented online, that Morales was the reason they had decided to leave. For everyone else, the mayor of Tampa, Jane Castor, delivered a stern warning on Monday evening. “Helene was a wake-up call,” she said. “This is literally catastrophic, and I can say, without any dramatization whatsoever, if you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re gonna die.”
In south Tampa, retired Army Colonel Norm Allen was in the process of updating his will. He designated beneficiaries for various accounts. On Wednesday, he put the will in a plastic bag and wrapped it with yarn—an idea his brother gave him—so it wouldn’t appear to be trash. “If things don’t work out, I want somebody to find it,” he told me. Allen, who is sixty-five, had decided to ride out the storm in his house, a one-story bungalow in the Palma Ceia neighborhood, with green-and-white-striped awnings over the front windows, and a large American flag waving above the front steps. Allen’s house is eighteen feet above sea level. He was not concerned about storm surge, but he was wary of the rain and wind. “My big fear is the trees,” he said. His yard didn’t have any, but all of his neighbors’ did. “I’ve had plenty of people question my judgment here,” he said. “But I’m an Army guy. I’ve been around the world, on a number of battlefields, in places where rounds and rockets are coming in on us. I’ve flown through dangerous areas in military aircraft.”
He and his dog Rhett, an eight-year-old English setter, were going to shelter in a narrow interior hallway, where he had placed a little sleeping pallet covered in quilts. “That ought to be safe, except for that big tree outside,” he said. The hurricane’s landfall was four hours away. He sounded calm, almost cheerful. If that tree came down, it could break through the roof over the hallway where he would be sheltering. “So I’m prepared to pull out a mattress and put it over me,” he said. He had also moved his tools, his chainsaw, his axe, inside the house. He had filled the bathtub with water (the county had shut off the water earlier), froze more water and put it in a cooler, and sedated Rhett. He was trying to avoid checking the news too often. “You also make sure you have a little bourbon or something,” he said. He would keep his yarn-wrapped will nearby. “You have to be smart, right?” he said. “I’m a little older now, and I’ve lived a full life.”
Allen’s home was about a block away from a mandatory evacuation zone. His neighborhood, usually full of families and kids, was desolate. When we spoke, he had just returned from checking on his neighbors’ houses. Many of them have koi ponds that he helps maintain. After he got off the phone, he heated up a chicken pot pie, his favorite meal. He figured he might not have hot food again for a while.
Allen’s house hadn’t sustained any damage during Hurricane Helene, just ten days earlier. But tens of thousands of houses and vehicles in the area had been damaged, or destroyed, by a five-foot salt-water flood that had washed over barrier islands and low-lying city neighborhoods. So, as Milton approached, far more people evacuated, heeding official orders and pleas. Stewart Macdonald and his wife, Laurie, did not. They live on St. Pete Beach, one of Tampa Bay’s barrier islands, all of which were under mandatory evacuation orders. “If the kids were here,” Macdonald, a financial adviser, told me, “we would have left.” But their kids were in Tallahassee, where they both attend Florida State University. So Macdonald, who had grown up in Florida and was accustomed to hurricanes—as a teen-ager, he said, a hurricane meant bringing a cooler of beer to the beach to party—and who had never evacuated for a hurricane before, decided to stay.
Their house made the decision easier. They had moved there in 2000, not long after it was built, by a ninety-year-old former concert pianist. She had specific acoustic and accessibility requirements, so the design was unusually sturdy: three stories, built from concrete, with a concrete-tile roof. The first floor was twelve feet above sea level, and the house had a concrete elevator shaft. In a worst-case scenario, the Macdonalds would shelter in the elevator. “I’m fully expecting to get an object flying through one of our windows,” Macdonald told me. Among the biggest threats were the ubiquitous piles of Helene wreckage. Some of the piles were twenty-five feet high. Mattresses, couches, tables, golf clubs, washing machines, long shards of wood and drywall—the piles still lined the streets. Projectiles in waiting.
The precise location of Hurricane Milton’s landfall remained uncertain nearly until its eyewall hit the central Gulf Coast, sometime after 6 P.M. By that point, severe, unexpected tornadoes—the kind usually seen in Kansas and Texas, and another example of the new abnormal conditions of our planet’s climate—had already devastated southern parts of the state. Fortunately, for Tampa, a city of more than three million people, the storm, which had been moving northeast, had veered right, with the eye passing over Sarasota just after 8 P.M. Farther south, Naples and Fort Myers, which were hammered by Hurricane Ian, in 2022, saw waters rise by five to six feet. “Because many areas hardest hit by storm surge are still inaccessible, the full magnitude of Milton’s impact has yet to be revealed,” Morales texted the next morning.
