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Sand swept by Hurricane Milton reaches halfway up the sliding doors of a beachfront villa on the island of Venice, Florida.
sarasota
Hurricane Milton: Death toll rises to 16 as Biden says storm caused estimated $50bn of damage
The storm downed power lines, shredded the roof of the Tampa baseball stadium and inundated homes.
LAST UPDATE | 11 Oct 2024
HURRICANE MILTON HAS killed at least 16 people after the natural disaster smashed into Florida, sending tornados spinning across the state and flooded swaths of the Tampa Bay area.
More than two million households and businesses were still without power today, officials said, and some areas in the path that the monster storm blasted through the state remained flooded.
“There’s places where water is continuing to rise,” Governor Ron DeSantis warned today. But while the storm was “significant,” he said, “thankfully this was not the worst-case scenario.”
In a White House briefing, US President Joe Biden said experts estimated the cost of storm damage at $50 billion (€45 billion).
The federal response to the huge storm – and to Hurricane Helene, which devastated parts of the US southeast just two weeks earlier – has taken on an increasingly political edge, and Biden said he would visit Florida on Sunday.
Amid questions as to whether the federal response is adequately funded, the US President called on Congress to “step up” its efforts, particularly to shore up hard-hit small businesses.
Former president Donald Trump has falsely claimed that the Biden-Harris administration has diverted hurricane response funds to care for migrants, drawing pushback even from some Republican officials.
Asked whether Trump was singularly to blame for a dangerous swirl of misinformation, Biden replied, “No… but he has the biggest mouth.”
Milton made landfall on the Florida Gulf Coast as a major Category 3 storm, with sustained, powerful winds smashing inland through communities still reeling from Hurricane Helene, which hit only two weeks ago.
The storm downed power lines, shredded the roof of the Tampa baseball stadium and inundated homes.
Hope amid desolation
On Siesta Key, a beautiful barrier island near Sarasota where the storm made landfall, Milton left a desolate landscape.
Some streets were still flooded today. Fallen trees and debris – sofas, beds, chairs and appliances, much of it left behind by Helene – were strewn haphazardly on roadsides.
“It’s just terrible,” John Maloney, 61, who owns a home remodeling company, said as he removed tree limbs from a seaside house he was working on. “But I think we’ll rebuild again.”
And 67-year-old resident Mark Horner sounded a note of optimism, telling AFP: “Our paradise will come back.”
Tornadoes, not floodwaters, were behind many of the storm’s deaths.
In Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, four people died in a tornado spawned by Milton.
In Tampa, police found a woman in her early 70s trapped under a large tree branch and pronounced her deceased, saying her death “is believed to be related to restoration efforts post Hurricane Milton.”
In Polk County, a member of a road crew was struck and killed by a colleague’s vehicle as he removed a downed tree.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas yesterday told reporters “our understanding that those fatalities were caused by the tornadoes.”
‘Suddenly you have nothing’
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 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.
In nearby Sarasota Bay, Kristin Joyce, a 72-year-old interior designer who also did not evacuate, took photos of tree branches snapped by the wind.
“There is no question it needs to be a serious wake-up call for everyone in terms of climate change,” she told AFP, surveying the damage.
Search operations were ongoing today – DeSantis said 1,600 people had been brought to safety – and the Coast Guard reported the spectacular rescue of a boat captain who rode out the storm, 48 kilometers from the shore, 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.
‘We’ll probably sell’
Experts said today that human-induced climate change made Hurricane Milton wetter and windier.
What would have been a Category 2 storm, the World Weather Attribution group of climate scientists said in a report, instead grew into a more destructive Category 3, on a five-point scale.
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 hit his house “like a bomb” and he had to swim on a dark night to a neighbor’s house. Milton left less water but more wind damage.
“We’ll probably sell… it’s just become too much for us,” he said – before adding that the family likely would move to a less flood-prone location not far away.
With reporting from AFP
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