Eerily prophetic 2020 simulation of fictional ‘Hurricane Phoenix’ hitting Tampa – as city braces for real life version with Milton

A simulation intended to prepare Tampa for a devastating Category 5 hurricane turned out to be eerily similar to the path Milton takes as it approaches Florida.

Project Phoenix, published in 2020, combined simulated weather reports and archived video footage from other storms to highlight the danger of a potential Category 5 hitting the area directly.

The bogus forecast said the worst-case scenario would hit Tampa on Oct. 15 – with winds of 160 mph and wing gusts of up to 200 mph.

Although Hurricane Phoenix was fictional, the warnings have taken on a prophetic meaning this week as the nightmare Project Phoenix envisions approaches in the form of the very real Hurricane Milton.

Project Phoenix predicted that a Category 5 hurricane in Tampa would leave more than 160 dead and 30,000 missing, as well as 300,000 people seeking shelter and cause as much as $200 billion in damage to buildings.

“The devastation of the region is almost unimaginable,” the narrator says.

The gruesome scenes used in the simulation show the city center underwater, with cars and debris floating around.

All bridges have been cut off by the storm surge, which is up to six meters high in some places.

The simulation also shows medical personnel saying they are trapped on the third floor of Tampa General Hospital.

“St. Petersburg is essentially an island right now,” says a newscaster as videos show houses with their roofs torn off by the wind.

The simulation ends the next day showing the devastation left by the storm, which destroyed the beaches, hospital, and most businesses and homes.

Project Phoenix was sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Florida Department of Emergency Management with the goal of helping local officials prepare for devastating weather events.

The last time the eye of a major storm like Hurricane Milton hit Tampa Bay, in 1921, the city was a sleepy backwater of a few hundred thousand people. A century later, it is one of the fastest growing metropolises in the United States, with more than 3 million residents, and highly vulnerable to flooding due to climate change.

As Milton barrels toward Florida’s Gulf Coast, becoming a Category 5 storm on Monday, experts are concerned that a century of happiness could suddenly come to an end.

The National Hurricane Center predicts storm surge in Tampa Bay and surrounding waters of between 8 and 10 feet above normal tidal conditions, and rainfall of between 4 and 6 inches as a result of Hurricane Milton.

A 2015 report from Boston-based catastrophe modeling firm Karen Clark and Co. concluded that Tampa Bay is the most vulnerable place in the US to storm surge from a hurricane, threatening $175 billion in damage.

The increased risk is partly a result of topography. Florida’s Gulf of Mexico coastline is shallow with a gentle, sloping shelf. The higher ocean floor acts as a barrier that stops the storm’s outflow of water, forcing the ocean to flow toward the coast.

That’s the opposite of Florida’s east coast, where the ocean floor suddenly drops a few miles offshore.

MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel said a hurricane in Tampa is the “black swan” worst-case scenario that experts have worried about for years.

‘It’s a huge population. It is very vulnerable, very inexperienced and that is a lost cause,” said Emanuel, who has studied hurricanes for 40 years.

“I always thought Tampa would be the city we would be most concerned about.”