Hurricane Ian, a Category 4 storm, made landfall on the southwest coast of Florida  Tuesday afternoon.

Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida as one of the most powerful hurricanes recorded in U.S. history with winds as fast as 150mph, according to a Wednesday AP News article. 

Catastrophic storm surge and inundation of 12-18 feet of water is expected along  Florida’s southwest coastline, according to a National Hurricane Center (NHC) key messages advisory for Hurricane Ian.

“The expected weather conditions have already happened: massive destruction on the southwest coast of Florida,” said Alison Bridger, San Jose State professor of meteorology.

The storm has left more than 2.3 million Floridians without power, with over 500,000 consumers losing power between 5:00 p.m. and midnight on Wednesday alone, according to PowerOutage.us, a power outage aggregate service used by AT&T and the U.S. military. 

“By morning we will see how Orlando has fared too,” Bridger said in an email. “After that, it will move back over the Atlantic, then move north and come ashore again around South Carolina, producing lots of rain.”

Bridger said warm air in the tropics can originate in the east or near Africa and then gain momentum as it approaches the Caribbean. That pressure system was bolstered by hurricane-favorable atmospheric conditions and very warm waters in the western Atlantic, which became Hurricane Ian’s main power source. 

Hurricane Ian was declared a Category 3 hurricane on Tuesday but after a rapid intensification just before landfall, it was declared a Category 4, according to a Wednesday CNN article. 

That means its wind speeds rose more than 35mph in 24 hours, which is a rare phenomenon that is occurring with more frequency as the climate crisis grows and ocean temperatures rise, according to the CNN article.

Category 3 hurricanes are storms with winds of 111-129mph while Category 4 hurricanes are identified by having winds 130-156mph, according to the National Weather Service’s webpage on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

On Tuesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis requested President Joe Biden grant a Major Disaster Declaration for all 67 counties, for all categories and for all types of assistance, according to a statement posted to DeSantis’ website.

The state has activated its Emergency Operation Center, expended $400 milion on response costs, activated 10,000 of the state’s national guard and opened about 220 shelters across the state, according to the Major Disaster Declaration request.

What separates Hurricane Ian further from other Categories 3 and 4 hurricanes in previous years is the sheer size of it, with hurricane force winds spreading 80 miles in width, according to the CNN article.

One serious area of concern is the almost 1 billion tons of slightly radioactive waste that is sitting in open-air ponds that are expected to overflow as flooding comes over the next week, according to a Tuesday AP News article.

Florida has 24 sites that store phosphogypsum, a byproduct of the state’s phosphate fertilizer mining industry. 

The byproduct phosphogypsum is primarily composed of the removed radionuclides found naturally in phosphate which decays into radium, that in turn decays into the radioactive gas radon, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) webpage.

The release of radioactive waste puts thousands of people at risk for adverse health effects, according to the same article. 

Radon is the number one cause of lung cancer in non-smokers according to an EPA webpage on the health risks of radon.

The devastation in Florida comes less than 24 hours after Hurricane Ian collapsed Cuba’s electrical grid Tuesday night, leaving all 11 million residents in the dark, according to a Tuesday Miami Herald article.

Cuba’s state-ran electrical grid had been suffering hour-long black outs before Hurricane Ian hit. The soviet-era oil-fired generation plants were unable to maintain power amid its more-than 100mph winds on Tuesday night, according to a Wednesday Reuters article.

As of Wednesday, only 7% of the country’s usual daily peak load of 3,259 megawatts had been recovered by some consumers in 12 different provinces of Cuba, according to the Reuters article. 

Alison Bridger said one of the biggest misconceptions with hurricanes and hurricane reporting is that you can sit and wait it out and trust in the infrastructure around you. 

“Floridians are famous for hurricane parties!” Bridger said. “But today we saw video on TV of a family of [six] who were on the upper floor of their house with water rising even up there. They should have evacuated.”

She said more and more people are coming to the realization that all around the world, the weather is continuously getting more extreme and damaging.