Hurricane Milton kills at least 11, many far from landfall

SIESTA KEY, Fla. – Hurricane Milton cut an uneven path of destruction as it tore across Florida from the Gulf of Mexico late Wednesday and entered the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday, largely sparing the densely populated cities around Tampa Bay but spawning deadly tornadoes far from its center.

The storm whipped barrier islands that were still recovering from Hurricane Helene two weeks ago and swamped inland communities with surge from rivers and creeks and copious rainfall. But its landfall just south of the booming Tampa-St. Petersburg region kept Tampa Bay from surging, a worst-case possibility.

In the Sarasota region, where Milton came ashore, the damage seemed largely caused by wind and not ruinous.

But on the state’s Atlantic coast, which also experienced hurricane-force winds, tornadoes that sprang from Milton’s outer edges were catastrophic. At least five people died when a tornado hit a retirement community in Fort Pierce, Gov. Ron DeSantis said. They were among a total of at least 11 deaths reported by officials in Citrus, St. Lucie and Volusia counties.

Emergency workers had conducted hundreds of rescues by Thursday afternoon, compared with thousands two weeks ago after Helene, which brought far worse storm surge to Tampa, St. Petersburg and nearby barrier islands, according to Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

DeSantis, who was traveling the state to survey the damage, dismissed the idea that two powerful hurricanes hitting the state within two weeks was unusual.

“There’s precedence for all this in history,” he said Thursday afternoon in Fort Pierce. “We will deal with tropical weather for as long as we’re Floridians.”

The aftermath of Milton, a Category 3 storm that followed a direct west-to-east track, underscored several truths about how Florida is experiencing hurricanes made increasingly frequent and powerful by climate change.

On one hand, the storms pose a dangerous, often deadly threat and can cause widespread misery, leaving millions of people without power and in need of repeated home repairs and unaffordable insurance.

On the other, Florida has learned to prepare for much of the damage that hurricanes can do. The state’s strong building code, which has made newer construction remarkably resistant to even fierce storms, most likely had a mitigating effect as Milton swept through. And 50,000 utility workers were on hand to help restore power to the more than 3 million customers who lost it, according to DeSantis.

That is perhaps of little solace to Floridians, especially those on the Gulf Coast, who in recent years have had to dig out of hurricane after hurricane, the memories of one becoming blurred with the next. Many of those who have suffered the most are older and of more modest means.

“My cabinets and furniture were ruined with Helene,” James Sowards, 71, said about the storm that inundated his home in Punta Gorda, north of Fort Myers, two weeks ago. On Thursday, he rushed from a shelter to survey the new damage. His low-slung concrete house in a modest neighborhood was submerged in 3 or 4 feet of water.

“Whatever was left, Milton wiped out,” said Sowards, a semiretired truck driver. “I was sleeping on the one good mattress. Now, I do not know what I am going to do.”

Rescuers pulled people from flooded or damaged buildings and vehicles in the Gulf Coast city of Clearwater and the inland city of Lakeland. Storm winds ripped the roof off Tropicana Field, the home of Tampa’s baseball team, and slammed a tower crane into a building in downtown St. Petersburg housing the region’s major newspaper, the Tampa Bay Times. Orlando, in the central part of the state, was lashed with rain. Daytona Beach, on the Atlantic coast, flooded.

Andreína Zapiaín escaped the growing swell outside her apartment complex in Clearwater in the middle of the night as Milton’s winds still blew. She and her family waded through the water in the darkness to reach a relative’s apartment on higher ground. The water was nearly chin-high, said Zapiaín, who is 4 feet, 9 inches tall.

“I couldn’t touch the bottom, really,” she said in Spanish as she recalled the deepest point of the flood. “I was floating. I think it’s the worst thing I’ve experienced in my life.”

In Bradenton, just north of Sarasota, Sharon Manolis, 72, was on the phone with a friend when wind gusts began to pull the roof off her mobile home. As the shed outside broke apart in the wind and flying debris shattered her bedroom window, she packed her medications, clothes and important papers in a pair of garbage bags and pushed open her door against the storm’s immense force, fleeing to her next-door neighbor’s residence in search of shelter.

On Thursday, half her roof was gone, her kitchen open to the blue sky above it. Cabinet doors hung by hinges, broken timbers strewed across the floor. But in a vivid illustration of the storm’s randomness, the dishes were still stacked in the cabinets undisturbed, magnets still clung to the fridge, and the paper towels hung neatly on their roll.

Manolis, her glittery gold nail polish perfectly intact, said she didn’t have a plan for her next steps. “I can’t stay here,” she said, “and I don’t have insurance.”

Farther south, in Fort Myers Beach, near where Hurricane Ian, a Category 5 storm, came ashore in 2022, Jacki Liszak, the local Chamber of Commerce president, waited for the Matanzas Pass Bridge to open to traffic so she could see how bad Milton had been.

“Folks did a good job listening to the warnings,” Liszak said, calling them well timed and well coordinated. Officials had been criticized for waiting too long to issue evacuation orders before Ian, which killed nearly 150 people, most of them by drowning in the storm surge.

As a result, Liszak said, Milton had not been as catastrophic, despite being the barrier island’s third recent damaging storm, after Ian and Helene.

“When I write the script to this movie, nobody is going to believe it,” she said. “It’s insanity.”

The three storms – Ian, Helene and Milton – have made Leticha Thorne rethink living in the state. The storm dumped so much water in her car that it filled the cup holders and jammed the trunk. It was a new car, a replacement after Ian flooded her old one two years ago.

On Thursday, she stood in the doorway of her Port Charlotte home and tried to imagine how strong the winds and rain must have been to push her ottoman and dresser across the room.

She thought about the possibility of this happening again. And again.

“Everything looks like it floated away. I have to start over. How much more can we take?” Thorne, a health care worker, said, tears welling in her eyes. “I want to stay in Florida because my family is here, but this is too exhausting. I need to find someplace where I can pick up the pieces.”

The bridge to Siesta Key, near where Milton came ashore, was closed to cars around midday Thursday. But many people were trekking over on foot, including Anna and Sam Abdelnour, Michigan residents who have owned a home on the barrier island for three decades.

The Abdelnours flew to Florida after Helene to deal with its damage. They arrived on Siesta Key on Tuesday. The best they could do was pile their furniture high, one piece over the other, to try to save it from the expected storm surge. Then they evacuated inland, to Lakewood Ranch.

When they opened the door to their home Thursday, though, they found no water inside. “We lucked out,” Sam Abdelnour said.

“It smells a little moldy, but we can deal with that,” Anna Abdelnour said.

“Last night,” she added, “we thought it was gone.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.