With its eye seemingly dead set on St. Petersburg, and behind it Tampa, for a direct hit, millions of people have been scrambling to figure out what to do. Many are fleeing the state entirely to the point that almost 2,000 gas stations are now completely without fuel.
It is expected that potentially millions of households will be without electricity for possibly an extended period of time, so Floridians are fueling up not just their cars but also their generators for a worst-case scenario.
Keep in mind that the Tampa area has not seen a hurricane this size coming its way since more than a century ago, long before anyone who is currently living there was even alive. The storm surge alone is enough to cripple the city in ways that might end up surprising even the most fearless storm chasers and survivors.
As of 2:43 pm EST on Wednesday, the GasBuddy gas price tracking service reported that one in four gas stations in Florida have no more gasoline in their tanks. There are about 7,900 gas stations throughout Florida, and roughly 1,900 and counting have run dry.
In the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, a whopping 62 percent of gas stations no longer have gas while nearly 37 percent of gas stations in the Fort Myers-Naples area have run dry.
"It's a testament to how fast the storm is moving and how intense it is," commented Patrick De Haan, an energy analyst at GasBuddy. "It's a game changer."
(Related: Tampa mayor Jane Castor has an ominous message for residents in her area: "if you stay, you'll die.'")
Port of Tampa a "critical" supply point for fuel distribution in Florida – how will it fare in the storm?
Gov. Ron DeSantis held a press conference about Milton in which he warned that Florida's reserves of 110,000 gallons of unleaded gasoline and 268,000 gallons of diesel fuel are falling rapidly because of widespread demand from residents trying to escape.
"We have been dispatching fuel over the past 24 hours as gas stations have run out," DeSantis told the press, adding that 1.2 million gallons of both gas and diesel are currently on their say to Florida via 27 fuel trucks that are being escorted by the Florida Highway Patrol.
"There is no fuel shortage," DeSantis declared. "Fuel continues to arrive to the state of Florida. But lines at gas stations have been long and gas stations are running out quicker than they otherwise would."
Because of the way Florida's oil pipeline system works, it is having to bring in tanker trucks to deliver more as there are no pipelines that bring gasoline into Florida from the Gulf Coast or northern states, which poses serious problems for the Sunshine State as Milton fast approaches.
"The Port of Tampa is critical to supply for much of the state," said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for OPIS, a company that tracks gas prices for AAA.
"It is one of most crucial pieces of fuel infrastructure in the country. I'd be hard pressed to find a market more dependent on waterborne supply and more susceptible to hurricane and storm surge."
It remains to be seen how impactful Milton will be on not just Florida's west coast but much of its eastern coast as well. Milton is no longer a Category 5 storm but it is still very powerful and expanding in size, behaving much like Hurricane Katrina did in 2005.
Natural disasters seem to be on the rise the closer we get to Election Day. Learn more at Disaster.news.
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