This intensity could spell potential disaster for Florida’s Panhandle. On Wednesday morning, Air Force Hurricane Hunters measured sustained, minute-long winds of 150 miles per hour near Michael’s eye. Winds that strong are capable of snapping trees in half, sending telephone poles flying through the air, and tearing the roof off of well-built homes. Such powerful gales often leave the area “uninhabitable for weeks or months,” according to the National Hurricane Center.

Read: Don’t pay attention to the hurricane category.

Michael’s winds are also unusually dangerous because they extend far out from the eye of the storm. The National Weather Service warns that more than 160,000 Floridians could experience sustained wind gusts in excess of 130 miles per hour on Wednesday. The storm will then bring hurricane-force winds to southwestern Georgia and southeastern Alabama.

But winds will not be Michael’s most life-threatening quality. More than 150 miles of Florida’s coastline will be temporarily swallowed by the ocean, as storm surge between nine and 14 feet swamps the shore. Nine feet of storm surge—in other words, the minimum forecast for this storm—is enough to turn cars into floating battering rams and cover one-story buildings.

What sticks out about Hurricane Michael’s development is that it got very strong very quickly. If you don’t live in Florida, and you feel like you only started hearing about Michael right before it made landfall, that’s because … you did. Unlike Hurricane Florence, which idled across the Atlantic Ocean as a powerful storm for days, Michael spun through the stages of hurricane formation relatively quickly. It became a tropical storm on Sunday afternoon. Only on Tuesday did it intensify into a major hurricane, with winds above 111 miles per hour.

President Donald Trump was correct when, speaking from the Oval Office on Wednesday, he said the storm “grew into a monster.” Meteorologists have their own name for this worrying phenomenon: “rapid intensification.”

How did Michael grow so strong, so fast? It got lucky. To borrow the president’s analogy, you can think of a hurricane as an enormous monster that feeds off oceanic energy (that is, warm ocean water) and converts it into atmospheric energy (that is, howling winds and terrible storm surge). This beast can grow to be very powerful, but it’s also scared by the slightest disturbance: Smaller local storms, or blustery winds in the high atmosphere, can weaken a hurricane or limit its growth.

Essentially, everything went right for the monster that became Hurricane Michael. As it neared the Florida Panhandle, it found waters that were very warm: almost 4 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. At the same time, it entered a patch of air that was relatively calm and windless. With lots of watery energy to devour, and few breezes to disturb its feast, Michael could quickly swell into a colossus.

Meteorologists have lately seen a number of storms that acted like this. Last year, Hurricane Harvey rapidly intensified in the hours before it made landfall near Houston. As the climate warms, more hurricanes are projected to undergo a similar process. Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT, has worried that climate-addled rapid intensification will make hurricanes increasingly difficult to predict. This would present a major problem, as the National Hurricane Center has struggled to improve its forecasts of hurricane intensity over the past three decades. While the government’s forecasts of hurricane storm track—that is, where a storm is going—have significantly improved since 1990, its forecasts of hurricane strength have not improved much at all in that time.