Hurricane Milton Update: Storm Bad, Evacuation Bad, Politicians Bad

For a period on Monday night, Hurricane Milton was among the five strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. Its pressure dipped down to 897 mbar, one of only a handful to fall below 900, and its maximum sustained wind speed topped 180 mph — effectively a tornado, stretched out to 100 miles wide.

At the latest update, Milton has weakened somewhat as it shears past the Yucatan Peninsula on its way to Florida, but it is still a beast. It will still be a major hurricane of category 3 or higher by the time it makes landfall, likely late Wednesday or early Thursday. The chaos it will bring is complicated by what Helene left behind a week earlier — what will 150 mph winds do to piles of debris still lying on streets across parts of the state?

Meanwhile, the people in the storm’s path aren’t doing so hot either. An evacuation that could rival that of 2017’s Hurricane Irma, when 6.5 million in Florida tried to get out of the way, has been difficult: how do you move that many people off of a flat peninsula with only a few major roadways? Reports of parking lot highways and overrun gas stations running out of fuel are rife; plenty of people are doing their best to heed the warnings and evacuation orders, but our systems just aren’t built for this. If Milton hits as hard as expected, this evacuation may well end up being permanent for some people.

And then there’s Washington — on Friday, President Biden sent a letter to Congressional leaders asking that they work quickly to add funding to federal disaster recovery efforts. The request, of course, had nothing to do with Milton — people in the path of Helene, in particular in western North Carolina, are still digging out from the last multi-billion-dollar disaster. With another one on the way, the request takes on even more urgency, but Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is… reluctant.

“We’ll be back in session immediately after the election,” he told Fox News Sunday, arguing that because it takes some time after disasters to fully understand the scope of the funding needs there was no urgency for Congress to act. This is, of course, absurd, and seems like a pretty blatant attempt to trade human suffering for an electoral swing. It also comes in the midst of one of the darkest onslaughts of misinformation in recent memory, with Republicans and Donald Trump in particular hyping up a lie that the Biden administration and FEMA have run out of money to help people by instead housing undocumented immigrants.

In a Milton preparedness fact sheet released on Tuesday, the White House continued to try and fight through those lies: “FEMA has sufficient funding to both support the response to Hurricane Milton and continue to support the response to Hurricane Helene.”

With or without Republicans’ help, the next storm arrives soon.