The last time the eye of a major storm like Hurricane Milton struck Tampa Bay, in 1921, the city was a sleepy backwater of a few hundred thousands people. A century later, it's among the fastest-growing metropolises in the United States,

Hurricane Milton is continuing to rapidly intensify before its expected landfall along Florida’s Gulf Coast sometime Wednesday. The National Hurricane Center on Monday issued a hurricane watch for a stretch of the coastline including Tampa Bay, which remained roughly in the middle of the forecast cone.