The death toll from Hurricane Milton increased to at least 16 on Friday, according to Florida officials, as locals began the difficult process of rebuilding their lives and homes.
Nearly 2.5 million people and businesses were without electricity, and some places in the mammoth storm’s course through the Sunshine State from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean were still inundated.
Milton hit the Gulf Coast late Wednesday as a Category 3 hurricane, wreaking havoc on areas still recovering from Hurricane Helene, which killed 237 people in the southeast United States, including Florida.
Milton left behind a bleak landscape on Siesta Key, a picturesque barrier island near Sarasota where the storm made impact.
Some streets remained inundated on Friday. Fallen trees and trash, including sofas, mattresses, chairs, and appliances that Helene had left behind, were strewn haphazardly along roadsides.
Resident Mark Horner, who moved there six years ago, said that while his house was mostly spared, the island “got hit really hard” and others were reconsidering their future.
But the 67-year-old expressed optimism, telling AFP: “Our paradise will return. It’s simply a little shocking to take it in.”
Tornadoes, not floodwaters, caused many of the storm’s deaths.
Milton created a tornado that killed four individuals near Fort Pierce, Florida’s Atlantic coast.
“They did find some people just outside dead, in a tree,” 70-year-old resident Susan Stepp told AFP. “I wish they would have evacuated.”
At least six people were killed in St. Lucie County, four in Volusia County, two in Pinellas County, and one each in Hillsborough, Polk, Orange, and Citrus counties, officials said.
The storm downed power lines, shredded the roof of the Tampa baseball stadium, and inundated homes, but Florida avoided the catastrophic devastation that officials had feared.
“The storm was significant, but thankfully this was not the worst-case scenario,” Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters.
The National Weather Service issued a record 126 tornado warnings across the state Wednesday, wrote hurricane expert Michael Lowry.
“It is not easy to think you have everything and suddenly you have nothing,” said Lidier Rodriguez, whose Tampa Bay apartment was flooded.
‘Get a life’
Search operations were ongoing Friday, and the Coast Guard reported the spectacular rescue of a boat captain who rode out the storm clinging to a cooler in the Gulf of Mexico.
“This man survived in a nightmare scenario,” Dana Grady of the Coast Guard’s St. Petersburg sector said in a statement.
President Joe Biden on Thursday urged people to stay inside until downed power lines and debris are cleared.
Florida’s back-to-back battering by Helene and Milton has become election fodder as Republican Donald Trump spreads conspiracy theories claiming Biden and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris are abandoning victims.
Biden snapped back on Thursday, telling the former president, “Get a life.”
‘We’ll probably sell’
Experts said Friday that human-induced climate change made Hurricane Milton wetter and windier.
“Heavy one-day rainfall events such as the one associated with Milton are 20-30 percent more intense and about twice as likely in today’s climate,” the World Weather Attribution group of climate scientists said in a report.
The effect boosted Milton’s wind strength by about 10 percent, making what would have been a Category 2 storm a more destructive Category 3, on a five-point scale, the report said.
Milton left some weary Floridians fed up and others digging in for the long haul.
In Orlando, on the east coast, 58-year-old Joe Meyer was loading his car after five days in a hotel to return home to Madeira Beach, south of Tampa.
Helene had hit his house “like a bomb went off,” and he had to swim to a neighbor’s house. Milton left less water but more wind damage.
“We’ll probably sell” and move to a less flood-prone location in the area, he said.
“We’re just to the age now where moving everything up, moving everything down — it’s just become too much for us.”