The latest from Milton:
- At least 6 dead statewide in Florida.
- More than 3 million without power throughout the state.
- Florida’s governor believes storm was significant, but not “worst-case scenario.”
- Milton compounds misery for many impacted by Helene late last month.
Rescue teams plucked Florida residents from the flotsam of Hurricane Milton on Thursday after the storm smashed through coastal communities where it tore homes into pieces, filled streets with mud and spawned a barrage of deadly tornadoes. At least six people are dead.
Arriving just two weeks after the misery wrought by Hurricane Helene, the system also knocked out power to more than three million customers, flooded barrier islands, tore the roof off a baseball stadium and toppled a construction crane.
Among the most dramatic rescues, Hillsborough County officers found a 14-year-old boy floating on a piece of fence and pulled him onto a boat. A Coast Guard helicopter crew rescued a man who was left clinging to an ice chest in the Gulf of Mexico after his fishing boat was stranded in waters roiled by Hurricane Milton.
But many people also expressed relief that Milton wasn’t worse. It spared Tampa a direct hit, and the lethal storm surge that scientists feared never materialized.
- Are you a Canadian affected by Hurricane Milton? Tell us about it in an email at ask@cbc.ca.
The storm tracked to the south in its final hours before making landfall in Siesta Key near Sarasota, about 112 kilometres south of Tampa. It brought up to 45 centimetres of rain to some parts of its metropolitan area, according to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center had discontinued all storm surge and tropical storm warnings related to Milton, now a post-tropical cyclone, by Thursday evening.
While Milton caused a lot of damage and water levels may continue to rise for days, DeSantis said it was not “the worst-case scenario.” The governor said Milton’s storm surge was not as expansive as Hurricane Helene, nor did it reach that storm’s peak heights. Helene made landfall on Sept. 27, with extensive cleanup from its wrath still ongoing in parts of the state.
“You face two hurricanes in a couple of weeks – not easy to go through – but I’ve seen a lot of resilience throughout this state,” the governor told a briefing in Sarasota. He said he was “very confident that this area is going to bounce back very, very quickly.”
Five people were killed in tornadoes in the Spanish Lakes Country Club near Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, where homes were destroyed, authorities said. Police also found a woman dead under a fallen tree branch.
At least 340 individuals and 49 pets have been rescued in ongoing efforts, DeSantis said Thursday afternoon.
Hurricane Milton spawned more than a dozen tornadoes as it hit Florida, destroying homes and killing at least four people. The four deaths occurred in St. Lucie County on Florida’s east coast, when multiple twisters touched down on Wednesday afternoon, said county spokesperson Erick Gill.
Speaking at a White House briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there were reports of as many as 10 fatalities from tornadoes, but he cautioned that the number was tentative.
He said the federal government has “the capability and the capacity to respond to and recover from multiple simultaneous disasters” such as the back-to-back hurricanes.
Still, Mayorkas cautioned that Congress needs to allocate more funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson posted a video to Facebook showing a 10,000-square-foot iron building that had been twisted into a crumpled heap by a tornado. The structure was where the sheriff’s office kept its patrol cars, but luckily no one was inside when it fell, Pearson said.
Officials in the hard-hit counties of Hillsborough, Pinellas, Sarasota and Lee urged people to stay home, warning of downed power lines, trees in roads, blocked bridges and flooding.
“We’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out,” Sheriff Chad Chronister of Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, said on Facebook.
Home of MLB’s Rays damaged
Tropicana Field, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team in St. Petersburg, appeared badly damaged. The fabric that serves as the domed stadium’s roof was ripped to shreds by the fierce winds. It was not immediately clear if there was damage inside. Multiple cranes were also toppled in the storm, the weather service said.
St. Petersburg residents also could no longer get water from their household taps because a water main break led the city to shut down service. Mayor Ken Welch had told residents to expect long power outages and the possible shutdown of the sewer system.
Just inland from Tampa, the flooding in Plant City was “absolutely staggering,” according city manager Bill McDaniel. Emergency crews rescued 35 people overnight, said McDaniel, who estimated the city had received 34 centimetres of rain.
“We have flooding in places and to levels that I’ve never seen, and I’ve lived in this community for my entire life,” he said in a video posted online Thursday morning.
First responders in Clearwater, Fla., used boats early Thursday to rescue people from an apartment complex surrounded by floodwaters. City officials were urging people to stay in place, saying on social media that downed power lines and fallen trees present a ‘significant danger.’
State officials said rescue crews would be going door to door in some areas Thursday. In Tampa, police said they rescued 15 people from a single-storey home damaged by a fallen tree.
“We are laser-focused on search-and-rescue operations today,” said Col. Mark Thieme, executive director of the Florida State Guard.
South of Tampa, Natasha Shannon and her husband, Terry, felt lucky to be alive after the hurricane peeled the tin roof off their cinder block home in Palmetto. They spent the night in a shelter with their three children and two grandchildren after she pushed them to leave.
“I said, ‘Baby, we got to go. Because we’re not going to survive this,”‘ she said.
They returned to find the roof torn into sheets across the street, shredded insulation hanging from exposed ceiling beams and their belongings soaked.
“It ain’t much but it was ours,” she said. “What little bit we did have is gone.”
By Thursday afternoon, Milton was headed into the Atlantic Ocean as a post-tropical cyclone with winds of 120 kph – just barely hurricane force.
Jessie Schaper, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Melbourne, Fla., said it was too early to know exactly how many tornadoes had touched down or how strong they were.
About 125 homes were destroyed before the hurricane came ashore, many of them mobile homes in communities for senior citizens, said Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said early Thursday that the storm was damaging, but the storm surge ‘as initially reported has not been as significant overall as what was observed for Hurricane Helene.’
Floods expected inland
About 90 minutes after making landfall, Milton was downgraded to a Category 2 storm. By early Thursday, the hurricane was a Category 1 with maximum sustained winds of about 135 km/h and leaving the state near Cape Canaveral.
In many places along the western coast of Florida, municipalities raced to collect and dispose of Helene debris before Milton’s winds and storm surge could toss it around and compound any damage. Storm surge flooded streets and homes and left at least 230 people dead across several southern U.S. states, including a dozen people in Florida’s seaside Pinellas County alone.
Jackie Curnick said she wrestled with her decision to stay at home in Sarasota, just north of where the storm made landfall. She and her husband started packing Monday to evacuate, but they struggled to find available hotel rooms, and the few they came by were too expensive. With a two-year-old son and a baby girl due Oct. 29, Curnick said there were too many unanswered questions to consider.
Video taken during the storm showed howling winds and sheets of rain lashing their glass-enclosed swimming pool as their son and dog watched. Trees shook violently.
“The thing is it’s so difficult to evacuate in a peninsula,” she said ahead of the storm. “In most other states, you can go in any direction to get out. In Florida, there are only so many roads that take you north or south.”
More than 60 per cent of gas stations in Tampa and St. Petersburg were out of gas Wednesday night, according to GasBuddy.
Tampa International Airport said it plans to reopen Friday morning, though Milton damaged six jet bridges used to board planes and crews were still repairing leaks in the main terminal.
DeSantis and other Florida officials cautioned residents who did leave to be patient in returning home and wait for assessments from their local authorities. The governor also warned about walking or performing tasks in standing water, which can contain bacteria.
Officials at the local level echoed much of that advice.
“My ask is please don’t rush home right now, we’re still trying to assess what’s going on,” said Sarasota Police Chief Rex Troche in a video. “We still have downed power lines, we still have trees in the roadway.”