Hurricane Milton crashed into Florida as a Category 3 storm Wednesday, pounding the coast with ferocious winds of over 100 mph, heavy rain and producing a series of tornadoes around the state. Tampa avoided a direct hit.

The cyclone had maximum sustained winds of 120 mph as it made landfall at 8:30 p.m. near Siesta Key, the National Hurricane Center said. Siesta Key is a prosperous strip of whitesand beaches home to 5,500 people about 70 miles south of Tampa.

More than 1.5 million homes and businesses were without power Wednesday night in Florida, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports. The highest number of outages were in Hardee County, as well as neighboring Sarasota and Manatee counties.

The Tampa Bay area has not taken a direct hit from a major hurricane in more than a century, but the storm was still bringing a potentially deadly storm surge to much of Florida’s Gulf Coast, including densely populated areas such as Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota and Fort Myers.

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