Milton update (bad weather and bad politics)

Milton, which wasn’t even a tropical depression on Friday, is now a rapidly strengthening major hurricane. ETA: When I started writing this post 90 minutes ago Milton was a Category 2 hurricane. By the time I finished it was a a Category 3. 30 minutes later it was a Category 4. It’s likely to get even stronger over the next 48 hours, and the current storm track is pretty much a worst case scenario for the Tampa area, with a likely landfall just north of the bay. This combination events would lead to a massive storm surge in a densely populated area that still has a lot of un-removed debris from Helene ten days ago.

The good news, such as it is, is that there’s a decent possibility that the winds from the storm will lessen quite a bit just before landfall, making the wind impacts much less devastating than if the storm retains its full strength. This, however, is not certain to happen, and in any event the storm surge is determined by the strength of the storm during the days when it’s over the Gulf of Mexico.

The bottom line is that people in the Tampa-St. Pete area who can should get out of there immediately, as the storm is still about 55-60 hours from landfall, although the surge will start arriving well before then.

Meanwhile, the Devout Christian ™ running the House of Representatives is making it pretty clear that he’s not going to call Congress back into session to provide an already overstretched FEMA with emergency funding:

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday did not commit to calling Congress back into session before the election after President Joe Biden pressed congressional leaders about potential funding shortfalls in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Johnson was asked about Biden’s letter to congressional leaders on Friday requesting more money for federal disaster recovery efforts and after Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that the department doesn’t have enough money to get through the rest of hurricane season.

In his letter, the president urged Congress to restore funding to the Small Business Administration’s disaster loan program, which was facing potential funding shortfalls even before Hurricane Helene devastated parts of the Southeast. The president noted that the White House requested more funding for the program as Congress prepared a short-term funding bill that passed last month to avert a government shutdown.

Pressed on whether he would call Congress back into session before the election, Johnson replied, “We’ll be back in session immediately after the election.”

“That’s 30 days from now. The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is it takes a while to calculate the actual damages, and the states are going to need some time to do that,” Johnson said, adding that determining “specific needs and requests based upon the actual damages” from natural disasters takes time.

Note this story was written yesterday morning, at a time when it wasn’t yet clear that another major hurricane was heading toward one of the most densely populated urban areas in the US.

I watched Fox News for five minutes this morning, and it was wall to wall complaints about how disaster relief in the wake of Helene isn’t getting to North Carolina fast enough, along with some of this kind of thing:

Johnson was also pressed about false claims by some Republicans that FEMA was using funds on migrants that have illegally entered the country instead of on the disaster response, which White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called “categorically false” on Friday.

The speaker acknowledged that the streams of funding for the border and hurricane response are different at FEMA before going on to insist that FEMA’s mission is to help people affected by natural disasters, and not engage in funding that helps migrants who crossed the southern border.

Johnson claimed, without evidence, that the Biden administration, Vice President Kamala Harris and Mayorkas “have been engaged in this program,” saying they used taxpayer dollars to assist migrants with resettlement by reimbursing nongovernmental organizations transporting migrants into the country.

“The American people are disgusted by this, up with it, and so are Republicans in Congress,” he said. “And it will stop after Nov. 5, because we’re going to have unified government with Republicans in charge and we will bring sanity back to this situation.”

“Claimed without evidence” is a very delicate way of saying “lied,” but it’s better than nothing I suppose.

Good piece on what a storm surge from a major hurricane would do to the Tampa Bay area.

UPDATE: Milton officially a Category 5 hurricane as of 10:55 CDT.