Tampa-area officials plan for worst-case scenario for storm
TAMPA — It is only a simulation. It’s also the worst-case scenario. One day, it could be reality.
“Hurricane Phoenix” is the hypothetical disaster that would change life in the Tampa Bay area forever.
Imagine a Category 5 storm that drowns South Tampa and turns St. Petersburg into an island. The bridges rendered impassable, the airports unusable and the region’s communities left on their own until help arrives. Power loss in some areas could last months. The beaches would be wiped away, as would tourism. Nearly every small business could die. Recovery would take a decade.
That is the vivid and grim picture painted by Hurricane Phoenix 2.0, the doomsday scenario hurricane simulation conducted by the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council.
If all that sounds hyperbolic, it’s not. The Tampa Bay area is considered to be one of the most vulnerable population centers to a hurricane strike. The fact that we haven’t been hit by a major hurricane in 99 years is nothing more than luck, experts say.
Phoenix 2.0 is the update to the council’s widely-cited 2009 Phoenix simulation, which first explained how devastating a major hurricane could be. It would create millions of tons of rubble and economic damage equivalent to erasing a small nation.
The report arrives at a particularly salient moment: Climatologists predict 2020 may be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record.
But there is no simulating the human toll of such a storm.
It’s impossible to calculate exactly how likely a hurricane like Phoenix is to strike Florida, much less the bay area. Only four Category 5 storms have hit the U.S. mainland in almost 170 years of recorded history. Yet, the National Hurricane Center estimates that statistically the Tampa Bay area should get hit by a Category 3 or higher storm about every three decades.
“You don’t need a 5 to bring Tampa Bay to its knees,” said Hurricane Center spokesman Dennis Feltgen.
One might think the worst-case scenario would have the storm’s eye going right over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and marching into Tampa Bay.
It is not. The worst-case scenario is actually the simulated path of Hurricane Phoenix, approaching from the southwest and making landfall at noon north of Tampa Bay’s mouth.
The planning council’s model targets Indian Rocks Beach — that allows the counterclockwise rotation of the storm to sling Gulf water into the bay, raising the surface waters until they overflow into communities like an unattended bathtub with the faucet left running.
The water would rise so dramatically that most of downtown and South Tampa would be under at least 12 to 15 feet of water, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency software tool used to estimate losses from potential disasters.
The edges of the South Tampa peninsula, all of Davis and Harbour islands, the Channel District and the banks of the Hillsborough River would see water 21 feet or higher.
Westchase and Oldsmar would be entirely underwater, with surge extending all the way inland to Gunn Highway.
One would be able to swim U.S. 41 from the Manatee River to the Ikea store in Ybor City.
The swollen Tampa Bay would meet the Gulf of Mexico in Seminole, swallowing much of mid Pinellas County: The Gateway area, Feather Sound, Pinellas Park, Lealman, Kenneth City and east Largo would all be under water, plus everything south of 22nd Avenue S in St. Petersburg. The intersection of Fifth Avenue N and 34th Street would be the center of St. Pete Island.
The highest surge would hit 42 feet.
The beaches as we know them would be gone.
Hurricane Phoenix would have sustained winds of 160 mph, making it a Category 5 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.
That is strong enough to destroy framed homes, tear roofs apart and decimate trees and power poles.
Wind gusts would reach the 200 mph mark. The takeoff speed of a Boeing 737 is about 150 mph, meaning a Phoenix-like storm could toss passenger jets aside like toys.
The simulated storm retains Category 5 strength as the eye cuts diagonally across the region, moving northeast through mid-Pinellas, the northwest corner of Hillsborough and central Pasco. By the time it reaches eastern Hernando, it would be a Category 4.
From daybreak until 7 p.m., the entire region — Citrus, Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco, Pinellas and Manatee counties — would be lashed by hurricane-force winds of at least 74 mph.
If what was left of Mexico Beach after a direct hit by Hurricane Michael in 2018 — the last Category 5 storm to make landfall in Florida — serves as a comparison,
Phoenix would destroy almost everything in its path.
The simulation, done at the planning council’s behest by disaster planning and preparedness contractor Critical Integrated Solutions, serves dual purposes:
“It’s both a warning about the chilling impacts of a catastrophic storm and a call to action for people to plan and prepare for a severe hurricane today — even if they’ve weathered many hurricane warnings in the past,” said planning council executive director Sean Sullivan in an email to the Times.
Phoenix 2.0 echoes the last major hurricane to make landfall in Tampa Bay: The 1921 Tampa Bay hurricane, which came ashore Oct. 25 in Tarpon Springs, just 20 miles north of Phoenix’s simulated landfall in Indian Rocks Beach.
Also known as the Tarpon Springs hurricane, the Category 3 storm leveled the region with up to 115 mph winds. It’s 11-foot storm surge flooded downtown Tampa and turned St. Petersburg into an island.
It killed eight people when the population was just 135,000 or so, and caused $10 million of damage in 1921 dollars.
The region rebuilt, driven by leaders who “sought to cover up the damage caused by the hurricane and rushed to draw attention back to the ‘paradise’ they marketed as Florida,” according to a 2008 article that Nicole Cox wrote for the journal Tampa Bay History.
That notion of paradise persists a century later, strong enough to attract people to the bay area’s endangered beaches, vulnerable coastline and expensive, low-lying neighborhoods, despite the risks.
But risk, said Jeff R. Temple, psychology professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, exists everywhere. Nearly every part of the U.S. faces a worstcase scenario.
“If it’s flooding, mudslides, or earthquakes, or fires, or hurricanes, or tornadoes, it’s really inescapable,” said Temple, whose home, just blocks from the beach, was destroyed by Hurricane Ike in 2008.