Hurricane Milton tore towards Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, leaving residents with one final day to evacuate or hunker down before the “catastrophic” Category 5 storm is predicted to hit, triggering a life-threatening storm surge.

With more than 1 million people in coastal areas under evacuation orders, those fleeing for higher ground clogged highways on Tuesday and petrol stations ran out of fuel, in a region still recovering from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Helene less than two weeks ago.

The storm was on a collision course for the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, home to more than 3 million people, though forecasters said the path could vary before the storm makes landfall late on Wednesday night.

The US National Hurricane Center described Milton as a “catastrophic” and “dangerous” major hurricane, packing maximum sustained winds of 260 kmph, putting it at the highest level on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale.

Weather conditions were expected to start deteriorating in the afternoon, it said.

The White House said US President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris would be briefed on the storm at noon and Biden would make remarks later in the afternoon.

Liz Alpert, mayor of Sarasota, Florida, said her coastal city just south of Tampa Bay was as ready as it could be.

“We’re as prepared as we can be... But this is going to be a really, really bad storm,” she told MSNBC in an interview.

“Emotionally for people to just have experienced that (hurricane) two weeks ago, and now here we are again, it’s really hard on everybody.”

Milton is on a rare west-to-east path through the Gulf of Mexico and is likely to bring a deadly storm surge of 3 metres or more of flooding to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast.

Officials from Biden to Tampa mayor Jane Castor warned people in evacuation zones to get out or risk death.

Michael Tylenda, who was visiting his son in Tampa, said he was heeding the advice.

“If anybody knows anything about Florida, when you don’t evacuate when you’re ordered to, you can pretty much die,” Tylenda said. “They’ve had a lot of people here stay at their homes and they end up drowning. It’s just not worth it. You know, the house can be replaced. The stuff can be replaced. So it’s just better to get out of town.”

While wind speeds could drop and downgrade Milton to a lesser category, the size of the storm was growing, putting ever more coastal areas in danger. In its latest advisory, the NHC said Milton was expected to turn to the east-northeast and east on Thursday and Friday. At 4 am CDT (0900 GMT), the eye of the storm was 485 km southwest of Tampa.