The 2am marker point for Ian’s location, puts it just West of Tampa Bay. An incoming tide along with the storm surge and wind on top of it. High tide for Tampa Bay is 4am Thursday morning, right as the storm is pushing a storm surge inland. This isn’t good for them at all.
Tide chart here...
https://www.tides.net/florida/2170/?year=2022&month=9&day=29
The opposite effect happened during Irma, which sucked the water out of the bay. Images...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hurricane+sucked+the+water+out+of+tampa+bay&t=fpas&iax=images&ia=images
No change on the 0800 update except a small pressure drop.
I have traveled to the West coast a lot. seems that I4 and rt 60 were the main routes from Tampa to Central Fla. if those are the two main roads and hundreds of thousands are evacuating all at once I don’t know how that would work.
Once upon a time (50+ years ago), when I had the idea I could live on a small sailboat moored at Davis Island in Tampa... Along came a hurricane which drove the waters about 3-4 feet OVER the fixed docks. I and several of the slip occupants were invited to use a couple's 44 foot Drift-a-Cruise houseboat as a refuge during the night, while we all went out to tend our lines as the waters rose. I'm still amazed that we had no casualties that night (despite the "Hurricane Party" beverages being consumed!
The only casualties of the night occurred about 3AM when a 38 foot sailboat, which was trying to ride out the storm in the bay, came in for shelter to the marina! They severely damaged a number of craft across from where we were! We would have been glad to help if they were over in our dockage area but..., we just had to watch their mini-horror show from afar! Thankfully there were no fatalities!
About a week later, I moved to an apartment on Davis Blvd and just kept the sailboat for weekends!