SamWilliams

Northern

‘Confusing rule’

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Hurricane Milton could trigger insurance losses of up to $60bn if it stays on its current path, with analysts warning the US’s 2024 hurricane season will “dent” insurers’ profitability.

The National Hurricane Center forecasts that the storm, which is heading towards Florida, will make landfall about 40 miles south of the city of Tampa as “an extremely dangerous major hurricane” on Wednesday night. It is currently a category 4 storm, with winds of up to 155 miles per hour.

Credit rating agency Morningstar DBRS estimates that a change of course leading to a direct hit on Tampa could trigger losses of up to $100bn, which would be on a par with those of Hurricane Katrina, and would make it one of the costliest natural disasters in US history.

Milton is the second major hurricane to hit the US in a fortnight. It comes after Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across several south-eastern states, killing more than 225 people and destroying roads across western North Carolina.

Morningstar warned that accumulation of losses over the 2024 hurricane season, which runs until the end of November, would “likely make a dent in insurers’ profitability”, particularly for those with “significant exposures to personal lines in Florida”.

On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US financial regulator, said it was “closely monitoring” the impact of Hurricane Milton on investors and capital markets, and would consider offering relief from filing deadlines for those affected by the storm. 

Florida governor Ron DeSantis said 6,000 members of the Florida National Guard and 3,000 from other states were standing ready to respond to the aftermath of the hurricane.

“This is the largest Florida National Guard search and rescue mobilisation in the entire history of the state of Florida,” he told reporters on Wednesday. 

DeSantis also tried to reassure Florida residents about the availability of fuel, following reports that some petrol stations had run dry because of panic buying. Highway patrol cars were escorting tankers through traffic to replenish supplies at petrol stations, he said.

In the Tampa Bay area, officials were sending text messages and calling people to warn them of the dangers of failing to evacuate their homes. In Pinellas County, which sits on the peninsula that forms Tampa Bay, officials warned people to “get out now”. 

Emergency management director Cathie Perkins said 13 public shelters were open for people with no other options to escape the hurricane, and warned bridges across to Tampa would soon close. “Everybody in Tampa Bay should assume we are going to be ground zero,” she said.

Meanwhile, an independent group of climate scientists said human-caused climate change had boosted Hurricane Helene’s devastating rainfall by about 10 per cent and intensified its winds by about 11 per cent. 

Global warming from the burning of fossil fuels had made the high sea temperatures that fuelled the storm 200 to 500 times more likely, the World Weather Attribution group found in a new report. 

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TOURISTS have been stranded in Disney World a mere few hours before Hurricane Milton strikes as trapped Brits say they’re “worried”.

The deadly tempest is set to smash Florida and bringing with it 160mph wind, 15ft storm surges – already forcing millions to evacuate.

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People were fearlessly captured arriving at Walt Disney World as Hurricane Milton vastly approaches Florida.

Among those staying at the Orlando park are Brits Terence and Cian, who are residing at Disney’s Pop Century resort as Florida braces for the deadly hurricane.

The couple from Basingstoke, England, told Sky News they’d been warned that all Disney Parks and Disney Springs would close from 2pm local time and were likely to remain closed throughout Thursday.

Terence said he had heard other guests attempting to arrange early flights home – but now the local airport has been closed.

He added that he and his husband had been forced to cancel dinner plans in another resort as there is no transport available.

Terence said: “It’s early, but it’s quiet.

“It’s raining quite a bit today, but at the moment it feels fairly normal for Orlando.

“It’s hard to know about the rest of the week until the storm hits and the damage becomes clearer.”

But he says the staff at Disney have reassured the pair that it is “one of the safest places to ride out a storm.”

Terence added: “One cast member told us that when the power goes out in Florida, the first place to get back online are the hospitals, the second place is Disney.

“The news over here is really talking about the storm as a life and death event, so it is a bit worrying, but we’re keeping positive and making the most of it.”

Florida has a few hours left before Hurricane Milton fatally hits.

The tempest’s “skull” shape has been captured via satellite image and locals who refuse to flee are warned to write their names on their arm.

Terrifying footage of the eerie face shows the Category 4 hurricane as it barrels towards the Florida coastline – ready to ruin anything in it’s path as millions evacuate to stand a chance of living.

The National Hurricane Center has now warned on X that as the hurricane looms, “the time to prepare, including evacuate” is “quickly coming to an end”.

Those who are refusing to flee Milton have also been told to write their names in permanent ink on their arm.

Florida’s Attorney General has desperately hinted that if residents were to stay, writing their names on their arms would make bodies easier to identify later.

Ashley Moody made the spine-chilling comment in a press conference with Republican Senator Rick Scott on Monday as she addressed residents going against evacuation orders.

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Are you in Florida as Hurricane Milton approaches? Get in touch with us to share your stories at annabel.bate2@the-sun.co.uk

She warned any Floridians who weren’t to evacuate “probably need to write your name in permanent marker on your arm so that people know who you are when they get to you afterwards.”

Referring to Hurricane Helene’s devastation last week, Moody also added that officials are still “uncovering folks on the beach who thought they could stay there, and the storm surge got them”.

As the hurricane gets closer to land the intensity of the storm will increase, raising the risk of tornadoes forming ahead of the main storm.

Florida’s National Guard are also said to be prepping the largest search and rescue moblizisation in history.

Gov. Ron DeSantis said there are 9,000 Guardsmen deployed, with one-third who have come from other states, with 26 search and rescue teams in place.

He added: “This is the largest Florida National Guard search and rescue mobilization in the entire history of the state of Florida.

“They are currently embedded in the potential impact sites along the west coast to begin immediate rescue operations as soon as the storm passes.”

Among Milton’s deadly chaos, storm chasers were captured being battered by extreme turbulence as they flew into the eye of the hurricane.

Scary footage shows scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) being thrown around the flight.

The aircraft named “Miss Piggy” was collecting data on the hurricane heading towards Tampa on Tuesday morning when the footage was captured.

Hurricane Milton has spawned two large tornadoes in Florida just hours before the 155mph storm makes landfall.

Locals have been told their home is a “coffin” as the Category 4 hurricane is set to bring 15-foot wave surges that could completely submerge houses in parts of the state.

The two large tornadoes were filmed crossing Interstate 75 in the Florida Everglades at around 10 a.m. local time – and were seen moving north between the towns of Miles City and Andytown.

Milton is bearing down on the state with 155mph winds as the “storm of the century” is set to make landfall in Florida.

The hurricane is now at Category 4 strength after weakening very slightly from wind speeds of 160mph overnight.

It is expected to remain a Category 4 storm as it strikes just south of Tampa at 2 am Thursday.

More than three million people are now at risk of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes are possible, the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) warns.

A tornado watch has also been issued for Florida south of Tampa down to the Florida Keys by the National Weather Service.

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It says tornadoes are “likely”, hail up to half an inch in size is possible, and gusts of 70mph are likely until 9pm tonight.

That could expose 12million in major cities like Miami to the extreme conditions.

Its thought conditions will only worsen after then.

Milton is set to hit just south of Tampa leading authorities in the city to put up flood barriers.

The fence successfully protected the facility from Hurricane Helene’s floodwaters about two weeks ago.

Tampa General Hospital, which sits on the edge of Tampa Bay, is set to stay open and is erecting an AquaFence to try and withstand a surge.

The hospital has an on-site energy plant, a five-day stockpile of food, and staff trained in emergency management to ride out the tempest.

Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned the city’s almost 400,000 residents to urgently evacuate.

Underwood took to X and posted about the flight after the footage was posted by NOAA.

It comes as…

She told CNN: “I can say this without any dramatization whatsoever: if you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”

She said the 15ft storm surge predicted for the city would be deep enough to swallow a house.

Castor said: “So if you’re in it, basically that’s the coffin that you’re in.”

The hurricane has brought the state’s tourism industry to its knees with cruise ships not able to dock, evacuation orders, and cancelled flights.

Disney World and Universal Studios in Orlando are also set to close in preparation for the storm.

There are fears Milton is set to be west Florida’s version of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or 2017’s Hurricane Harvey.

Katrina killed 1,400 people and wrought $125billion damage on the US economy.

Milton is expected to be a low-level Category 4 when it lands – putting its winds at the bottom of the 130-156mph range.

US President Joe Biden said those staying in their homes were facing “a matter of life and death”.

He said: “This could be the worst storm to hit Florida in over a century, and God willing, it won’t be, but that’s what it’s looking like right now.”

Transport links out of central Florida are chaotic or blocked entirely as people try and flee to safety.

Sheriff Chad Chronister or Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, said they have already seen flooding in the city.

He told CNN: “This is the 11th hour. If you’re in an evacuation zone, the time to get out is now.”

St. Pete-Clearwater International Airport is being transformed into a mandatory evacuation zone after the final flight leaves today.

Orlando Airport have stopped all operations, effective from 8am today.

Over 4,600 prisoners are also being moved due to Milton, say Florida’s Department of Corrections.

Thousands of terrified residents have tried to flee towards Miami with motorways left at a standstill.

Tampa’s main airport closed on 9am Tuesday with officials saying it will remain empty until the weather conditions improve.

Florida is already waterlogged after Hurricane Helene hit a fortnight ago meaning more rain won’t drain into the ground.

Bull sharks swam in the streets of the bayside town of Punta Gorda just two weeks ago when Hurricane Helene hit.

Officials said they are still uncovering bodies on the beach who they cannot identify after they believed they could ride out the storm.

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

In the cinema of science-fiction, corridors take a lead role. It’s within those interstitial spaces that the action and beauty unfold, from intense moments of peril to the panning of backlit walls configured to look infinite in scale. Each possible future has its own design. There are the hexagonal passages of the Death Star in Star Wars circa 1977, and the octagonal ones in Alien: Romulus. The corridor is a sci-fi trope – and the extreme nature of these spaces gives interior designers something to draw from. 

Set designer Gary Card created the original and recently refreshed interior for the LN-CC store in London, with its much-photographed octagonal corridor. “It has a definite retrofuturism to it,” Card says of the bright-orange wood tunnel. “I liked the idea of making something futuristic out of an economical, simple material and seeing how far we could push it. When we saw its parallels with 2001: A Space Odyssey, we leaned into that feeling further. Something I’ve learnt with corridors is that they’re a good way to envelop an audience as well as anchoring a space.”

The corridors of the future take disparate visual paths. Some look like an intergalactic take on Gaudí, as in the David Lynch version of Dune; others are chillingly reductive, like the warren of whitewashed underground halls in Westworld, where Yul Brynner’s rogue cowboy android pursues the last surviving guest of the theme park. 

I give hallways a feeling of ‘no gravity’

Norma Kamali’s New York penthouse in the Herzog & de Meuron 160 Leroy building in New York is all white, including the bare internal corridors, where shadows cast by doorways change during the day. It’s a bold, deliberate choice. “I want things as simple as possible,” says Kamali of the design. “It works creatively for me, so I still feel that there’s another idea coming tomorrow. I hate looking back.”

The influence of sci-fi design on the psyche has become an obsession for many. Between 2012 and 2015, the artist Serafín Álvarez assembled an online archive – scificorridorarchive.com – collecting stills of hundreds of scenes set in connecting halls on film. The process itself was the artwork, as Álvarez brought various worlds together on the blog, inviting you to imagine connections between them. But you can also enjoy the graphic arrangements.

Nerds of all kinds are fixated on sci-fi sets, from the obsessives who can tell you that Clara in Matt Smith-era Doctor Who walks through the same distorted, honeycomb corridors in “The Name of the Doctor” as she does in “Journey to the Centre of the Tardis”, to the architects who have made it their career goal to turn fiction into reality. The Zaha Hadid signature is sci-fi – the corridors and staircases of the 520 West 28th building in Manhattan that she designed shortly before her death have amorphous apertures, windows and bends, and her studio still creates similar silhouettes. 

Marc Newson has created numerous projects with poured floors, seamless curves and dramatic sheen that’s a universe away from traditional tongue and groove in architecture. What could be sexier than a reflective floor in a material you can’t quite identify? Think of Darth Vader’s menacing walk, at pace, on those shiny black Imperial surfaces. Likewise, backlighting of walls in sci-fi corridors lends a celestial glamour. Some sci-fi is purposely grubby – Andrei Tarkovsky’s art direction was the work of genius but has a dank, dripping vérité. But most sci-fi is pure gloss. The tube-shaped corridors in Gattaca look like a series of ring lights around a runway and feel very Prada.

“I have always been obsessed with hallways and giving them a feeling of ‘no gravity’ or an illusion of the information age,” says New York-based designer Karim Rashid, who has created numerous projects with hyper-real graphics in carpets and walls, including the Magic Hotels in Norway and the Prizeotel chain. “I want to transport people from public to private. It creates a mood shift. I was brought up with science fiction, watching 2001, Logan’s Run, Solaris and Blade Runner. Sturgeon’s Law [90 per cent of everything is crap] applies to corridors – 90 per cent are badly designed. But lighting and technology now afford us Tron-like spaces with long lines of LEDs. For example, the hallways at the Nobu hotel in Warsaw and the Belgium Nhow hotel.” 

The interlocking fabric Clouds tiles by the Bouroullec brothers could easily be used to create an astounding fractal tunnel, while recent designs by Paddy Pike – who cites the film Ex Machina as an inspiration  – include polished-steel portals and the striped rugs of his Cresco Collection, which he has shown installed as arches to pass through from room to room, like a kind of trompe-l’œil 1970s starship corridor. “My recent focus has been on doorways,” he says. “I’m drawn to creating pieces that dominate a room, offering a sense of transformation as you move through the space.”

Cate Blanchett’s home in Tár was shaped by the owner’s fascination with 007

Many public and private spaces take their cues from sci-fi corridors. Most of Tadao Ando’s buildings on the art island of Naoshima in Japan feature concrete corridors that recall the work of set designer Ken Adam (most notably the beautiful but abysmal Moonraker). Australian design practice Wood Marsh has created fabulous spaces with concrete curves that are wonderfully Ken Adam too. In the same vein is the concrete walled gallery and private penthouse of the Boros Bunker in Berlin, which was also home to Cate Blanchett’s eponymous character in Tár. Speaking to the FT in 2017, owner Christian Boros talked of his fascination with 007, which helped shape the penthouse. 

When architects George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg moved into their Richard Meier-designed apartment overlooking the Hudson River, they left most of the walls and columns gallery-white, but panelled one corridor with smooth wood from a single log sourced from India. This is backlit at each corner with a disorienting concave Anish Kapoor lacquer dish hung at the end of the hall, where the axis of each line of light meets. The effect is totally sci-fi but also quietly sensual. To play against it, a Napoleonic French chair sits midway down the corridor.  

Next May, Tate Modern opens a survey of work by Do Ho Suh entitled The Genesis Exhibition, including installations featuring coloured translucent corridors. The artist is not the first to explore internal spaces. In 1959, utopian architect Frederick Kiesler created “Model for the Endless House”, a cement sculpture in the permanent collection of the Whitney. Each space meets another in a never-ending loop, like the corridors that sci‑fi characters run through on repeat. 

Elongated transitional spaces can be emotive and dramatic. Back in 1987, Foster + Partners created a store for Katharine Hamnett on Brompton Road that was revolutionary – a white tunnel that led from the street into the industrial store incorporating a 35m glass bridge, lit from below, with a gentle arch. It created a sense of awe and mystery. Its most recent reincarnation was as a now-closed restaurant, festooned with fake foliage and Chesterfields and serving bottomless brunch. The world will change again. The only way is forward, whichever corridor you choose. 

The chief executive of Seccl has claimed that “crap technology” has compromised the adviser-client digital experience.

David Ferguson said most of the technology in the advice sector “is quite old” and not “built for connectivity”.

He said: “We now talk about API, but if you look at the end-to-end thing, the adviser client digital experience has been compromised by crap technology and their business efficiency has been constrained by that as well.”

Ferguson made his comments at Money Marketing Interactive in London yesterday (8 October).

He was speaking as part of an industry panel for advisers on how they can choose the right systems and tech stack for their business.

He noted that though technology has grown in leaps and bounds over the last 20 years, the advice sector technology still lags in several areas, including integration.

Ferguson said the issue is affecting adviser businesses.

“One thing that troubles me is a lot of the cost in adviser businesses is [because] they are dealing with providers that can’t do the job properly.                                                                                                                                                                      “And that’s technology not speaking to each other even in the inside of these provider companies. The idea that they’re going to magically speak together outside with other systems – that’s just completely nuts,” Ferguson said.

Speaking on the same panel as Ferguson, Timeline founder and CEO Abraham Okunsanya, dispelled the myth about a ‘best of breed’ technology stack.

He said: “This idea of best of breed versus all in one doesn’t exist.

“There aren’t many technology stacks in the market today that will do everything you want and equally the idea that you bring together all these various tools, and you will get the same level of efficiency or effectiveness as you do with an all-in-one [system] is just not true.

“Ultimately you have to figure out what you want to achieve with your business and try to find the technology solution that does that.

“I would argue that the direction of travel is that we’re moving towards more joined up technology, more integrated ecosystem than multiple tools that just don’t talk to each other.”

Zerokey co-founder and CEO, Joseph Williams, said that advisers should have the choice of the technology solutions they want to adopt.

“They shouldn’t be faced with the compromise of choosing best of breed [and] the inefficiencies that it brings.

“If they wish to use an all-in-one solution and that’s what they believe is best for them and their clients, then that’s the route they should go down,” Williams said.

He said that whatever route advisers chose, their tech stacks should “talk to one another”.

“There are ways that we can solve this solution other than the traditional approach to integration that we’ve always forged and clearly it hasn’t worked,” he added.

Williams cited the Lang Cat report, published five years ago, that showed 85% of advisers blamed lack of integration for major cause of inefficiency.

The figure has risen to 94% in Intelliflo’s latest adviser efficiency survey.

On addressing the integration question, Okunsaya said he believes the sector needs to address the trust issue between institutions and regulated entities.

“Unless we can remove the lack of trust between regulated entities, we’re always going to find ourselves in this position,” he said.

“This is why I gave up hope on this idea of multiple third-party integration being the primary way that we drive efficiencies within financial planning firms.

“I strongly believe that the solution is you have an integrated ecosystem being probably 70, maybe 80% of what you want as a firm and then you plug one or two other things on top of that.”

Benchmark Capital CEO, Ed Dymott, said the problem is due to too many players in the advice space trying to outcompete each other.”

He said: “When I look at the adviser ecosystem, there are too many people trying to be in the same space. I think that’s not a trust thing. I think that’s everyone trying to compete in the same area. I think that’s a big challenge.

Dymott blamed regulation, particularly the Consumer Duty, for not addressing this issue.

“The Consumer Duty should have mandated better service levels and better access to providers,” he said.