Florida residents awoke Thursday to the devastation from Hurricane Milton, which ripped through the Tampa area, barreled across the state and spawned deadly tornadoes before spinning out into the Atlantic.
Five people were killed after tornadoes touched down in St. Lucie County on Florida’s east coast, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the storm’s total death toll was at least 10.
On the west coast, the hurricane shredded the roof of Tropicana Field in St.Petersburg, the home of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays. Across the state, the storm knocked out power to more than 3 million homes and businesses, according to PowerOutage.us.
While Governor Ron DeSantis said Florida avoided a “worst-case scenario,” he cautioned that search and rescue operations were still underway. Since some areas are still cut off, a full assessment isn’t possible yet in a state that was also slammed in late September by another major storm, Hurricane Helene.
Greg Cruz, a 49-year-old in Sarasota, rode out Milton at his home, which is in a mandatory evacuation zone. He said he didn’t have a place to go with his three kids, ages 19, 16 and 14, and his dog.
“It was very scary – we had the house boarded up, so we couldn’t see outside, and all you could hear is the battering of the wind,” he said. “I could feel my house shaking sometimes. I looked outside and saw my car, just shaking in that wind. I was afraid I’d wake up and my car would be washed away, trees uprooted.”
Luckily, his home didn’t sustain as much damage as he feared. Now he’s helping neighbors repair their roofs. As a single dad, he said his main focus was on his kids.
“It was scary for them, but they’ve been through enough storms by now,” he said. “They were born in Florida, and this is part of Florida life for them.”
Alex Franceschi, 44, hunkered down in his home with his six cats in Tampa’s Seminole Heights neighborhood.
“The wind was howling,” he said. “I’ve lived here so long, but that storm was no joke.”
Franceschi, who works in administration at a moving company and has lived in the area since 2005, said he felt confident about sticking out the storm. His home is reinforced with cinder blocks and is set more than 20 feet above sea level.
Still, he felt “pretty scared,” he said.
“It was like a heavy whoosh and you could hear the branches hitting the windows, you could just hear everything around you moving,” he said. “I was like, man, did I make the right decision staying here? It was like nothing I’ve experienced before.”
He said he thought the damage would be worse in the morning than it turned out to be. While there were a few uprooted trees and fallen limbs, the house was fine.
He doesn’t have any power but he has a generator going and he’s been helping his neighbors clear branches off the streets.
In Fort Myers, Bob Goodman was kicking himself for not evacuating.
“I had booked a flight out, but canceled it when it looked like the hurricane was going to Tampa,” he said. “It was harrowing last night.”
The 63-year-old sheltered in the second story of his home with a couple friends and his two dogs. He kept hearing branches falling outside and lost power. This morning, there was debris everywhere, but his roof remained intact.
Goodman, who works as an attorney, joked that he was going to sue himself for “negligent infliction of emotional distress” after not evacuating.
In nearby Fort Myers Beach, Alex King had a sense of foreboding hours before landfall, as Milton was already flooding the main road. The town had just been hammered by Helene, which sent a major surge of water through. Two years ago, Hurricane Ian destroyed roughly 80% of the structures on the barrier island town.
“Right after Helene, we were walking down the streets helping people with the Red Cross, kids and stuff, and people would come out and say, ‘Alex, I’m done,’” King said.
He rode out Milton and its surge in a villa built from reinforced concrete to weather the worst storms. Now he’s worried about the future of his town.
Mansions were already transforming Fort Myers Beach, going up on empty lots once home to decades-old bungalows on wooden stilts that were cleared by Ian’s 15-foot (4.6 meter) storm surge. Hundreds of destroyed properties were purchased by affluent buyers who built elevated and reinforced homes, and can afford to comply with strict construction codes.
King, a real estate broker and lifelong resident whose grandfather arrived in 1958, said Milton is likely to deal another blow that will hasten his town’s conversion into a place where only the the super rich will be able to live.
“People will not be the same,” he said. “It’ll be a generational transformation.”