For more than a century, Tampa Bay has avoided Florida’s most destructive hurricanes. Now Hurricane Milton may end that streak of luck, as the storm is expected to make landfall just south of Tampa Bay in the early hours of Thursday morning. The low-lying shoreline, still strewn with debris from last month’s Hurricane Helene, is bracing for a storm surge of up to 15 feet.
Tampa Bay’s shallow seabed and built-up coastline make it particularly vulnerable to hurricanes. A 2015 report from disaster modelers Karen Clarke & Co ranked the Tampa–St. Petersburg area as the most vulnerable city to storm surge flooding in the