ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Hurricane Milton slammed into Florida’s western coast Wednesday night as millions of people braced for the worst impacts of a ferocious storm that had already brought dangerous tornadoes, driving rain and lashing winds to the state even before it made landfall.

Milton barreled ashore at 8:30 p.m. in Siesta Key south of Tampa Bay as a Category 3 storm with maximum winds of 120 miles an hour.

The hurricane’s path took it into a populous swath of Florida’s western coast that is home to the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota and Fort Myers, threatening to devastate an area of the Gulf of Mexico that is witnessing its second major hurricane in two weeks. Hurricane Helene made landfall farther to the north shortly after 11 p.m. on Sept. 26.

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“What we’re looking at is a storm of the century,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said Wednesday morning as she issued a final plea to residents to seek safety. Helene, which killed more than 230 people in several southeastern states, including at least 27 in Florida, was already the worst that many in the city had experienced in their lifetimes, she said. But it “was a walk in the park compared to what Milton’s going to bring our way.”

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The hurricane was expected to produce a massive storm surge of up to 15 feet in some places, along with torrential rain and violent winds before it tears eastward across the state, spreading the potential for flooding, tornadoes and wind damage.

As the storm drew closer to shore, at least 19 unusually intense tornadoes ripped across the southern part of the state, a prelude to the full fury of the hurricane. More than 50 tornado warnings were issued by the National Weather Service office in Miami alone, a calendar-day record, and nearly 116 in the state overall.

Keith Pearson, the sheriff of St. Lucie County on Florida’s east coast, confirmed there were “multiple fatalities” after a tornado struck Spanish Lakes Country Club around 4:30 p.m. He was not able to say how many. Search and rescue crews were poring through “dozens” of tornadoes that struck before Milton’s core arrived, said Erick Gill, a county spokesman.

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Footage on social media also showed houses demolished, roofs torn off and windows shattered in Fort Myers, south of the Tampa Bay metro area. Early indications, however, suggested that Tampa itself dodged the worst possibilities.

A head-on strike to Tampa Bay or just to the north would have represented a nightmare scenario for the city, sending a disastrous surge of ocean water from the Gulf of Mexico onto a shoreline that has witnessed a development boom in recent decades.

Milton instead made landfall slightly to the south of Sarasota, a move that could spare Tampa relatively speaking but increased the potential for a catastrophic surge around Sarasota or near Fort Myers, an area that took the brunt of 2022’s Hurricane Ian, which killed scores of people in the state.

Authorities issued mandatory evacuation orders for parts or all of 15 counties in Florida that have a combined population of more than 7 million people. Some fled a few miles inland, just seeking higher ground, while others drove hundreds of miles away to different states. Still others were unable to leave or decided to take their chances despite the danger.

By late Wednesday, the time for outrunning the storm and making preparations was over. All that was left was to wait — and, some said, perhaps to pray.

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Elizabeth Murphy’s hometown of Edgewater, Fla., sits squarely in Milton’s path across the state. She and her family drove north to Georgia in search of an elusive hotel room. “You hope and pray for the best,” she said, her voice beginning to crack with emotion. “But you worry what you’ll come back to.”

Some residents were waiting until the last minute to decide whether to leave their homes. In St. Petersburg, Rickie Moore was boarding up his windows with sheets of plywood Wednesday morning. He planned to ride out the storm, but he had also registered at a local hurricane shelter just in case he changed his mind.

Melody King nearly lost everything when Hurricane Ian hit her home in Fort Myers Beach in 2022. Scrolling through Facebook on Wednesday night, she watched with disbelief as several friends documented the waves flooding their streets, almost covering the tops of mailboxes. They didn’t evacuate. She doesn’t understand why.

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King is sheltering about 20 miles inland. By 6:30 p.m., the surging water had already inundated parts of Fort Myers Beach, a community that has barely recovered from the trauma of two years ago. She doesn’t think she will have a home to return to. “It feels like I’m watching the last hours of a few of my friends’ lives as they post live,” King said. “I’m afraid many there will perish unless they are really, really high up.”

In Pinellas County, home to St. Petersburg, officials issued mandatory evacuation orders for about half of the county’s 1 million people, according to John Carkeet, a county spokesman. As rain and wind battered the city Wednesday, about 11,000 people had evacuated to the county’s dozen shelters, a fraction of the total population but still one of the largest evacuations in recent memory.

The four bridges connecting St. Petersburg to the mainland had closed and were not scheduled to reopen until they’re inspected after the storm, Carkeet said. “Right now, it’s hunker down or get to high ground,” he said.

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At Phillippi Shores Elementary School in Sarasota, where an evacuation shelter opened Tuesday, dinner was served early — around 4 p.m. — for fear that the power would soon go out. On the menu were chili, hot dogs, pasta bake and barbecued beef. Evacuees at the shelter ate off black Styrofoam trays while they sat on the long cafeteria benches.

Nearly 500 people were staying at the shelter as of Wednesday night, hours before landfall. The population at the shelter had doubled on Wednesday as people sought late refuge, said Chris Parenteau, a Sarasota County Schools spokesman.

By 5:39 p.m., Sarasota Police had pulled its last patrol car off the streets, saying the wind speeds were too strong. “We will now wait out the storm, just like you, and once it passes, we will begin our rescue and recovery process,” the department said in a post on X. Shortly afterward, an alert sent to mobile phones said that all county emergency services were suspended “due to hazardous conditions.”

Officials issued stark warnings Wednesday about the catastrophic potential of the storm even as they stressed the extent of their preparations. Milton is “going to pack a major, major punch and do an awful lot of damage,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in a Wednesday morning briefing.

He said the Florida National Guard was marshaling the largest search-and-rescue deployment in the state’s history, including 6,000 personnel from Florida and 3,000 from other states.

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FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell arrived in the state on Wednesday, pledging to coordinate assistance between federal, state and local authorities as her agency responds to Milton in addition to handling ongoing relief efforts from Helene.

In Pinellas County, where at least 14 people died in Hurricane Helene and where its debris still littered the landscape Wednesday, officials issued last warnings to residents in particularly emotive terms.

It’s not just that homes will flood and people might drown, Cathie Perkins, the county’s emergency management director, said at a briefing. With a storm surge as large as Milton’s, buildings and homes could be wiped off their foundations. “That is unsurvivable,” she said.

Perkins repeatedly begged those in mandatory evacuation zones and people living in mobile homes to seek safer shelter while they still could. More than 8,000 people were already in shelters, Perkins said, but the county has the capacity to house 20,000.

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Those who stayed could face a terrifying situation, she said, especially if cellphone service cuts out and emergency responders are themselves stuck. “Please, I don’t want you to experience what it feels like to be stuck in your home, in the dark and have water rushing in,” she said. “You will truly be on your own.”

A chorus of elected officials, meantime, implored residents not to fall prey to disinformation about the Milton response, including a post on X falsely claiming that FEMA would prevent people from returning to their homes if they left. A DeSantis aide said the post endangered the lives of Floridians and first responders.

“Just know that the more titillating it is, the more likely somebody is making money off of it,” DeSantis said. “They don’t really give a damn about the well-being and safety of the people that are actually in the eye of this storm.”

President Joe Biden urged all those in the storm’s path to follow the instructions of local officials and said that he had spoken with DeSantis as well as the mayor of Tampa to offer all possible assistance. Biden decried what he called the “reckless, irresponsible, relentless promotion of disinformation” in recent weeks, falsehoods that also alarmed and endangered victims of Helene. “It’s got to stop.”

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In Tampa, the day jangled nerves well before the heaviest bands of rain hit shore. At 12:45 p.m., cellphones in the city blared an emergency alert. “Expect Milton impacts soon. Find shelter,” the message read.

Earlier, as sheets of rain fell across the city, dozens of people trickled into Middleton High School, one of several shelters open to those seeking refuge from the storm.

They arrived carrying clothes and water in plastic bags, huddled together under flimsy umbrellas, shuffling with canes. A family from Honduras stepped out of a white sedan with five parakeets, two guinea pigs and a black rabbit named Pollo.

As of 9 a.m. some 1,200 people had taken shelter at the school out of a capacity of 2,000, according to a Tampa city employee and shelter supervisor, Regina Castillo. She said the shelters would remain open as long as there is a need.

Two Walmart employees in Tampa, Eugenia Nava, 57, from Venezuela, and Fernanda Corrado, 34, from Honduras, had arrived at the shelter Tuesday night and slept on the floor.

“This is my first storm,” said Nava. “We’re Latin Americans, we’re not accustomed to this stuff.”

“We have to leave this in the hands of God,” Corrado added.

As much of central Florida braced for the impact of Hurricane Milton, hundreds of thousands of evacuees headed north into southeastern Georgia, where highways were clogged and hotels mostly, if not fully, booked across a region still recovering from the damage wrought by Helene.

“We’re just trying for anything, but we’re probably going to have drive into South Carolina at this point,” Murphy, the evacuee from Edgewater, said as she stood waiting Wednesday outside a local Marriott.

Their town was already prone to flooding, and after Helene, Murphy said her family felt didn’t want to take the risk of riding out Milton at home. Floridians are accustomed to storms, but “this one is very, very stressful,” she said.

Across the region, traffic was heavy on highways and side streets as people sought to outrun the storm. On I-95 northbound, which runs to the west of Savannah, traffic was 264 percent higher than normal near the Florida-Georgia line on Monday and 89 percent above normal early Tuesday, according to the Georgia Department of Transportation.

In Savannah, a tropical storm warning was in effect — an improvement in the forecast from days ago when some feared Milton could shift north after rampaging across Florida and travel up Georgia’s southeast coast. Still, the potential threat of winds gusting up to 50 mph was unnerving to many in the region, some of whom had only had their electricity restored last weekend, more than a week after Helene downed trees and power lines.

Partlow reported from Tampa, Pietsch from Sarasota, Bailey from Savannah, Ga., and Slater from Williamstown, Mass. Brianna Sacks in Tampa, Lori Rozsa in Ocalaand Jason Samenow, Allyson Chiu, Fenit Nirappil, Kyle Melnick, Dan Stillman, Maria Luisa Paul and Scott Dance in Washington contributed to this report.