Hurricane Milton has been upgraded to Category 5 on AccuWeather's RealImpact™ Scale. It will threaten Florida with 150-mph winds, storm surge and flooding. Jon Porter provides updates. Stay safe!
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00:00Our Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter, John, map discussion just wrapping up just a few moments ago.
00:07Breaking weather news, we have decided to do something here at AccuWeather.
00:12We've only done a handful of times since instituting the AccuWeather Real Impact Scale for hurricanes.
00:19That's right. AccuWeather's team of experts, we've just met, looked over all the data.
00:23We've decided to make Milton a Category 5 on the AccuWeather Real Impact Scale for hurricanes.
00:30We talked about this all morning long, that this was under consideration.
00:34And we've decided to do that because we are concerned about a catastrophic storm surge
00:39to heavily populated areas that can forever alter the coastline across parts of the western portion of the Florida coastline.
00:48For Tampa Bay, Bradenton, Sarasota, we're expecting that there can be widespread catastrophic damage from that storm surge.
00:56A very life-threatening situation, which means that the storm gets the highest rating on the AccuWeather Real Impact Scale for hurricanes of 5.
01:05And John, we made the decision based not solely on Tampa, but heavy populated areas even south of Tampa,
01:13toward Sarasota, toward Bradenton, Siesta Key, where Bill Waddell was reporting this morning.
01:18And the key is, while this storm may come far enough south that the worst conditions wouldn't be in Tampa,
01:24or it could be just north of Tampa that would include in Tampa,
01:27there's a large enough population in harm's way because of this storm surge that we decided to go with that decision.
01:35Am I correct in that?
01:36That's a great characterization.
01:37And we want to urge, this is an extremely life-threatening situation with regard to that storm surge.
01:44It's such an unusual historic track that's going to become one of the most costly and damaging hurricanes that Florida has experienced.
01:53And that's another reason that we're rating the storm at this high level on the AccuWeather Real Impact Scale.
01:58Now, we also want to point out, though, there is a way out with this in terms of that the impact could be less.
02:05So if the storm does make landfall a little bit further to the south, away from Tampa, away from Sarasota and Bradenton
02:15and some of those really densely populated areas, then thankfully the storm's impact from a financial perspective would be less.
02:24And so we want to identify that that is a risk as it relates to this.
02:28But we are very concerned about the damage being catastrophic in some of those large, densely populated areas.
02:36And that's why we made the decision we did.
02:38All right.
02:39AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter again.
02:41Breaking news, AccuWeather.
02:43We've only done this a handful of times.
02:45We are now making Hurricane Milton a five on the AccuWeather Real Impact for hurricanes.