Florida Gulf Coast residents emptied grocery shelves, boarded up windows and fled to evacuation shelters as Hurricane Ian churned closer Wednesday, lashing the state's southern tip with tropical storm-force winds hours before it was forecast to make U.S. landfall.
Ian, which pummeled Cuba on Tuesday and left the entire Caribbean island nation without power, was expected to crash ashore into Florida on Wednesday evening south of Tampa Bay, somewhere between Sarasota and Naples, as a potentially deadly Category 4 hurricane.
A Category 4 storm on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale carries steady winds of up to 209 kilometers per hour (130 miles per hour). The first hurricane advisory on Wednesday put Ian's maximum sustained winds near 195 km per hour, ranking it a Category 3, but said the storm was expected to strengthen.