Hurricane Ian is churning toward the Florida coastline and is expected to make landfall sometime Wednesday.
The storm has rapidly intensified into a Category 4 hurricane, and the National Hurricane Center’s predicted path is entirely focused on central Florida.
If the predictions are accurate, the storm will race toward Florida and make landfall somewhere on the coast near the Fort Myers area Wednesday afternoon.
While the storm’s likely landfall is predicted to be further south than believed on Monday, Tampa Bay is still expected to receive up to six feet of storm surge.
If the forecast holds, the worst-case scenario for Tampa, a city that is both highly vulnerable to storm surge and incredibly lucky to have dodged a direct hit from a hurricane for a century, might be avoided.
But make no mistake — Tampa is not terribly far from the center of a Category 4 hurricane that is predicted to slow down and carve through central Florida through Thursday.
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As the storm continues to approach the coastline, several webcams within the city show the current situation in Tampa. See the following webcams below to see for yourself what it looks like as Hurricane Ian approaches.
