pack up and GET THE HELL out...

you’re playing Russian roulette staying in Tampa at this point. They’re going to be pushing 3 FEET of rainfall on top of 10-12 feet of storm surge for 24 hours. You need to get out ASAP if you’re thinking of riding this out.

CAT 4 with 140 MPH winds..

2am thursday morning will still be a high CAT 1 or low CAT 2 will inland

Good advice.

but some will not listen.. then will blame someone else.. not saying our people here will point fingers but someone somewhere will

It's always easy to look from the outside and tell people what's best for them but, until you own property, business, live there the decision is never an easy one to make.

business and property can be replaced, your life or family CAN NOT. yes im an outsider looking in but my life and my family is more important than any material thing i have ever owned or will own

My cousin moved down to Tampa 3 years ago. I offered to let he and his family to stay with us for a couple days but he's gonna ride it out...

If that storm tracks directly up Tampa Bay during a high tide, then there will be higher waters than those residents have ever seen before. That’s what happened to us in Santa Rosa County in 2004. There was extremely high water in areas that had never flooded. It looks like the storm is going to weaken quite a bit, right before landfall, so the wind is not going to be the biggest problem here.

Tampa gonna be the Next Katrina. 200 mile wide tornado coming through real slowly .

I'm about 20 miles east of downtown and I'm riding it out. If I was in or near downtown or the coast,I'd be evacuating no doubt.

This is not going to be good. Prayers for the folks on the west coast of FL.

We've been here before.... plan on a circus.

130-145 mph is no where close to weak. Plus it's forecast to stall over the Tampa area for somewhere around 10-12 hours

Just bad news all over.

Gas back to 5.00$ a Gallon next week?

Yep, this is the right answer. Not EVERYONE in the whole Tampa area needs to be evacuating, that just creates more of a debacle. It really depends a lot home to home, situation to situation. I'm 20 miles inland from the coast and not in a flood zone in a slab and brick home with tons of supplies and a generator. It would take a cat 5 bearing down directly on downtown Pensacola(I'm a bit to the east of there) to get me to even begin to think about abandoning ship. I know Medic you have good intentions, but not even DeSantis just now on the news said everyone in the Tampa area needs to evacuate. His exact words were you don't have to go far necessarily, just get to higher ground if you are in low lying areas. Definitely a bad deal for sure and Tampa hasn't had something like this in a long time, but panic evacuating when you don't really need to causes more issues...and then the next time around, it makes people question evacuating b/c they don't want to get in the mess again when they actually should be.

Then we have First Responders and Health Care workers and such who have to stay there and protect the lives of the ones that didn't heed the warnings. Even if they wanted to, not everyone can evacuate. Prayers for the live savers and those not able to get out..

The original forecast had it hitting landfall as a cat 1. That has now changed to a cat 3. Not good!

One thing a lot of folks are not thinking about are just how many bridges are going to come apart. The Tampa area has bridges that connect to other bridges that connect to other bridges. Each one of those, if they do not come down, will still have to be inspected before any traffic can cross them. Its going to take a long time for the area to become fully operational again.

If it keeps trending South, Tampa might get spared the worst of it.

This right here. I'd much rather deal with the west side of the storm vs the east