Hurricane Milton

Update 10/11 | Summary
Posting Date: October 11, 2024, 9:00:00 AM

The scope and scale of damage from Hurricane Milton across the Florida peninsula has started to come into focus since the storm departed the east coast of the battered state Thursday morning.

The Verisk ALERT Team has refined our selection of similar stochastic events from Thursday, based on our current understanding of the storm and its impacts.  These can be downloaded from the ALERT website.  The information contained in this posting is strictly confidential and is solely for the use of Verisk clients; disclosure to others is prohibited.

Overview of Milton’s Impacts in Florida

Milton was the fifth landfalling hurricane of the season in the United States, making it only the 9^th season since 1851 to see five landfalls.  1886, 1985, and 2020 share the record with six landfalls.  Milton follows closely on the heels of Helene, which brought significant storm surge and flooding to many of the same areas impacted by Milton.  This could complicate claims settlement and loss estimation, especially in areas such as Hillsborough and Pinellas counties that saw significant storm surge from Helene, and where cleanup efforts had not fully concluded.

Conditions began to deteriorate across the southern Florida Peninsula early on Wednesday as Milton’s outer bands began to reach shore, led by a unusually robust tornado threat owing to the highly sheared environment over Florida produced dozens of reports across the southern part of the state during the day. Several of these tornadoes – 45 reported in all - were quite large and caused structural and roof damage to buildings in populated areas like Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast and Vero Beach on the Atlantic Coast. In Palm Beach County, a wind gust of 92 mph was observed associated with a confirmed tornado passing close by. Hurricane building codes appear to have helped mitigate the damage to some degree from the extensive tornado, in particular helping to maintain the structural integrity of buildings subjected to tornadic winds, but there was still extensive damage from these events, especially to other building components. 

Meanwhile, the same increasing wind shear that aided in the tornado threat was acting to steadily decrease Milton’s maximum intensity through the day, but also acted to expand its wind field, especially on the storm’s northwest side. As a result, by late afternoon tropical storm conditions were impacting virtually all of the Florida Peninsula and as far west as Mexico Beach. Around this time, Milton’s heaviest rainfall bands were slamming into Florida’s central west coast and producing rainfall rates of 3-5 inches per hour that for some locations persisted for several hours. This core of rainfall gradually made its way inland, reaching Orlando shortly before midnight. Preliminary rainfall totals show just over 18 inches fell in Saint Petersburg and 11 inches at Tampa International Airport, leading to flash flooding and compounding the effects of storm surge along the coast. Significant flooding was observed at points along the coast and well inland. NFIP take-up rates in the counties surrounding the Tampa metro area hover around 25% in aggregate, lower than along the southwest coast of Florida, but significantly higher than inland areas impacted by precipitation-induced flooding from Helene.  Estimates of privately insured flood risk in these regions are less certain.

Milton’s wobbling track ultimately steered the system south of Tampa, making landfall in Siesta Key and South Sarasota around 8:30pm as a Category 3 hurricane per the NHC. Despite the storm’s major hurricane status, the highest measured maximum sustained wind over land was 78 mph, or low-end Category 1 strength, in Venice. A few locations reported gusts of over 100 mph; including Tampa Skyway Fishing Pier (103 mph) and Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport (102 mph), with the high-water mark of 105 mph coming from an offshore platform in the middle of Egmont Channel at the mouth of Tampa Bay. It should be noted that there were likely higher sustained winds and wind gusts over land in some locations, especially near Milton’s landfall location, but their either was no instrumentation to measure these winds, or the instrumentation had failed because of power outages. The winds resulted in major structural damage near Tampa and St. Petersburg. In downtown Tampa, the roof was ripped off Tropicana Field and a crane was blown over into the Tampa Bay Times office building. As expected with a more southerly track, Tampa was spared from the worst-case storm surge scenario; rather than water being funneled into the Bay, Milton actually drained the Bay for a time, and significant surge impacts have not generally been observed there. Areas south of the landfall point were not so fortunate and experienced significant to catastrophic surge from Milton. For example, the storm surge exceeded 10 feet in Sarasota and around 5 feet in Fort Myers. The magnitude and damage severity associated with Milton’s storm surge may not be fully realized until survey teams can complete their work.

Milton continued to produce hurricane conditions for an isolated region near the storm’s core and widespread tropical storm conditions as it tracked east-northeast across the Florida Peninsula overnight. By 5am Thursday, Milton was moving off the Florida east coast, still a low-end hurricane with estimated maximum sustained winds of 85 mph; around this time an observation of 83 mph sustained wind and a 92-mph gust was reported in Marineland, at the Flagler / St. John’s county line along the Atlantic coast.  High waters and street flooding were also reported along parts of the east coast as Milton moved offshore, including New Smyrna Beach, Edgewater, and Palm City, among others.

Verisk ALERT Plans for Milton

The Verisk ALERT Team is currently developing modeled scenarios for Hurricane Milton.  We currently plan to release these along with an estimate of insured industry losses early next week.  Please check the ALERT website for updates on timing and specifics over the weekend.  Our next e-mail communication is planned for Monday, October 14. Please contact your Verisk representative with any additional questions about Hurricane Milton.

Update 10/11 | Downloads
Posting Date: October 11, 2024, 9:00:00 AM

The information provided herein is strictly confidential and is solely for the use of Verisk clients; disclosure to others is prohibited.

Similar Stochastic Event IDs

Note: These lists give event IDs taken from our stochastic catalog that have similar characteristics as the current event.

Product	File Type	Description	Download
TOUCHSTONE / Re	Excel (xls)	Selected set of stochastic events, with Readme in Excel format, with track map and industry losses
TOUCHSTONE / Re	CSV (csv)	Selected set of stochastic events, formatted for import into Touchstone/Re