Hurricane Milton slams Florida with powerful wind and rain

AccuWeather

Storm chaser Tony Laubach reported live from the midst of intense wind gusts and torrential rain as Hurricane Milton made its way across Florida on the night of Oct. 9

Transcript

00:00We're going to get over to Tony Laubach, meteorologist Tony Laubach in Ruskin, Florida, on the south side of Pillsboro County, south of Tampa.

00:06A fierce storm here as well near I-75, just south of Tampa Bay. Tony?

00:13Yeah, we're just south of Tampa, near the Ruskin area. We're at a rest stop here on I-75 and we've been dealing with some of those winds.

00:19You've been talking about some of the stronger gusts that we've been seeing, probably in the 60-70 mile an hour range.

00:24Believe it or not, right now is actually some of the calmer winds that we've seen here.

00:28About five minutes ago, we were seeing those gusts approaching 80 miles per hour,

00:32probably to the point where I could do the moonwalker into the wind there, leaning into it and actually holding up in the wind.

00:38Right now, we're seeing probably about 70 or so miles per hour.

00:41Actually, there's a gentleman over here in a green hat. I don't know who he is, but he's standing here at the rest stop with me.

00:46We're both in the wind here now. We're getting a pretty good gust, probably about 60 or so.

00:51Things were calm down to the south a little bit ago, but we're seeing a much different story here.

00:55Why don't you come on in here, sir? What's your name?

00:57I'm Jerry.

00:58Jerry, what are you doing over here?

01:00I'm chasing.

01:01You're chasing? We've got another chaser here. We're all a bunch of crazies here. How long have you been out here right now?

01:05I left Sarasota, say about 3 o'clock, after they figured the eye was going to turn up here.

01:11Came up here, drove through it. Been here about four hours or so.

01:15What's it been like for you up here?

01:17Just like this.

01:18Just like this. Exactly. And that's what we're talking about here.

01:21The people out that should be out right now should only be the experienced folks.

01:25We've seen a lot of emergency crews, storm chasers, media. Those are the only ones you want to be out right now.

01:30I-75, for the most part, Jeff, is pretty passable.

01:34There are areas where there's some tree debris down in the road, but nothing like we've seen in past hurricanes,

01:38like in Louisiana where we see entire trees in the road.

01:41So most everything has been pretty passable for the most part.

01:44We've moved a little further inland because of some of the flooding.

01:46You heard Bill talking about it a little bit ago.

01:49That has been some of the issue, the closer you get down to shore.

01:51So we wanted to get out of the flooding area.

01:53We're working our way back up to Tampa right now.

01:56That is going to be the goal here, is we're going to make a very slow trip of it.

02:00As you can see, these winds, again, gusting 60, 70 miles per hour at times.

02:04So we're definitely in that northern-western quadrant of that eyewall

02:08where we're seeing these really, really potent winds.

02:10The power is still on behind me, but a couple of trees in the background there are uprooted.

02:15Some of them pushed over.

02:16But again, power has been sporadically off.

02:19That's been the thing I've been the most amazed with, honestly, Jeff,

02:22is that we haven't seen complete darkness everywhere.

02:25Power is still on in many places, although a lot of folks are without power and many more to come.

02:31All right, Bill.

02:32All right, Tony Laubach, meteorologist Tony Laubach in Ruskin, Florida, with the tenacious backside of this storm.

02:38That's the business side of this storm.

02:40If you are south of the center of the storm here, we are dealing with some very strong winds,

02:44and the storm surge is rushing in.

02:47Just talking to Bernie, we have 70-plus mile-per-hour winds in Lakeland.

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