Key points
- Hurricane Milton killed at least 10 people in Florida.
- The storm has now weakened and moved into the Atlantic Ocean after causing widespread destruction.
- Over three million homes and businesses lost power across Florida.
Hurricane Milton made landfall in the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday after carving a destructive path across Florida that spawned tornadoes, killed at least 10 people and left millions without power, but the storm did not trigger the catastrophic seawater surge feared .
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the state had avoided a “worst-case scenario” but warned that the damage was still significant. The Tampa Bay area appeared to have avoided the storm surge that had prompted the most dire warnings.
US Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a White House briefing that the government has reports of at least 10 deaths in Milton, adding that they appear to have been caused by tornadoes.
In St Lucie County on Florida’s east coast, a wave of tornadoes killed five people, including at least two from Spanish Lakes retirement communities, county spokesman Erick Gill said. Search and rescue teams are combing the hardest-hit areas, including a mobile home park.
There were 19 confirmed tornadoes in Florida as of 8pm local time on Wednesday, around the time Milton made landfall, DeSantis said.
According to PowerOutage.us, more than three million homes and businesses in Florida were without power Thursday morning.
At least some had already been waiting for days for power to be restored after Hurricane Helene hit the area two weeks ago.
In the Tampa area, the storm toppled trees, threw debris onto roads and downed power lines, video footage from local news shows showed. Some neighborhoods were flooded, but the extent of the damage won’t be known until crews can assess the destruction, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said at a morning news conference.
Steven Cole Smith, 71, an automotive writer and editor who lives in Tampa about 7 miles from the Gulf Coast, rode out the storm with his wife. He said the wind shook the windows so hard he thought they would shatter.
“We really had nowhere else to go,” Smith said of their decision not to follow evacuation orders. He has a home in Central Florida, but said the forecast for that area looked just as bad as where he was located.
Fortunately, he said, Tampa was spared a direct hit.
The storm hit Florida’s west coast Wednesday night as a Category 3 hurricane on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale. While still a dangerous storm, Milton had weakened from rare Category 5 status as it crossed the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida.
Milton moved further over land, becoming a Category 1 hurricane as it reached the eastern coast of the peninsula, the National Hurricane Center said. By Thursday morning, the storm was moving away from Florida’s Atlantic coast after lashing communities on the East Coast.
