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One Belizean-American who is riding out the storm at home is Aria Lightfoot. She lives in Pasco County which is a part of Tampa - and she gave us a deeper and more personal perspective on the storm:

Aria Lightfoot, Belizean in Florida
"I am in Pasco county Florida which is one of the counties in Tampa Bay and right now we are getting rain and some little bit of gust but the storm isn't predicted to hit really until 2 o'clock in the morning."

"Where I am in Florida I am not in an evacuation zone so what the county says is if you can stay at home, stay at home and save it for the people who are coming from the coast so that they can utilize the shelters plus the shelters the firetrucks everything is within a 5 mile radius from where I live."

"They don't anticipate where I am to have that level of damage they anticipate the coast the people who literally live on the water to suffer the initial wins and the level of damage, but we don't know because Florida this part has not been hit directly for almost 100 years so right now everyone is speculating tomorrow we will know whether or not people were right or wrong."

"We've done this every year by the way in Florida every year we get threatened, but this year the threat is very real, and I don't know what our impact is going to be because the hurricane is wobbling if it wobbles more south, we will get less impacted if it wobbles more north, we will be directly impacted so it is a waiting game that is very nerve-racking. I have turned off national media because they went into 100 ways you can die in a hurricane type scenario so I couldn't deal with it. I was just like let me chill out for a while."

Lightfoot says she is bracing for extended power outages - but expects that mobile data services will still be available. Forecasters say extremely heavy rainfall across the Tampa area will continue and spread across Central Florida this evening, increasing the risk of life-threatening flash flooding.