BRANDON, Fla. — Florida residents who fled hundreds of miles to escape Hurricane Milton slowly returned home on crowded highways, tired from their long trips and the cleanup work ahead of them, but also grateful for come back alive.
“I love my house, but I’m not dying in it,” Fred Neuman said Friday as he walked his dog past a rest stop on Interstate 75 north of Tampa.
Neuman and his wife live in Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall Wednesday evening as a powerful Category 3 hurricane. Heeding local evacuation orders ahead of the storm, they traveled nearly 500 miles to Destiny on the Florida Panhandle. Neighbors told the couple the hurricane destroyed their carport and caused other damage, but Neuman shrugged, saying their insurance should cover it.
Nearby, Lee and Pamela Essenburm prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a picnic table while cars exiting the slow highway waited for parking spaces outside the crowded rest area . Their home in Palmetto, on the south end of Tampa Bay, experienced a tree fall in the backyard. They evacuated fearing the damage would be worse, fearing Milton could be hit by a catastrophic Category 4 or 5 storm.
“I wasn’t going to take any chances,” Lee Essenbaum said. “It’s not worth it.”
Milton killed at least 10 people when it crossed central Florida, flooding barrier islands, ripping the roof off the Tampa Bay Rays baseball stadium and spawning deadly tornadoes.
Authorities say the toll could have been worse without widespread evacuations. The still recent devastation caused by Hurricane Helene two weeks earlier probably contributed to forcing many people to flee.
“Helen probably gave us a stark reminder of how vulnerable some areas are to storms, especially coastal regions,” said Craig Fugate, who served as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama. “When people see for themselves what can happen, especially in nearby areas, it can lead to a change in behavior during future storms. »
In the beach town of Punta Gorda, Mayor Lynne Matthews said rescuers only had to save three people from floodwaters after Milton, compared with 121 rescues during Helene’s flood.
“So people listened to the evacuation order,” Matthews said at a news conference Friday, emphasizing that local officials were making sure residents heard them. “We had crews going around all of our mobile home communities and other locations with megaphones letting people know they needed to evacuate.”
As of Saturday morning, the number of Floridians still without power had fallen to less than 1.6 million, according to poweroutage.us. St. Petersburg’s 260,000 residents have been asked to boil water before drinking, cooking or brushing their teeth, at least until Monday.
Traffic slowed along stretches of I-75 as evacuee vehicles crowded alongside a steady stream of utility trucks heading south toward Tampa. While the densely populated city and surrounding Hillsborough County accounted for nearly a quarter of the remaining power outages, Milton spared Tampa a direct hit and the deadly storm surge that scientists feared never materialized.
On Sunday, President Joe Biden will assess the devastation caused by the hurricane on Florida’s Gulf Coast. He said he hoped to connect with Gov. Ron DeSantis during the visit.
The Florida trip gives Biden another opportunity to pressure Republican President Mike Johnson to call lawmakers back to Washington to approve additional funding during the pre-election recess. That’s something the top lawmaker in the House of Representatives says he won’t do.
Biden argues that Congress must act now to ensure the Small Business Administration and FEMA have the money they need to get through the hurricane season, which extends through late November in the Atlantic. The president said Friday that Hurricane Milton caused an estimated $50 billion in damage.
As the recovery continues, DeSantis warned people to be careful, citing continued safety threats including downed power lines and standing water that could hide dangerous objects.
“We are now in a period where there are deaths that could be prevented,” DeSantis said Friday. “You have to make the right decisions and know that there are dangers. »
National Weather Service meteorologist Paul Close said rivers “will continue to rise” for the next four or five days, leading to flooding, mainly around Tampa Bay and northward. These areas were hit by the most rain, adding to a wet summer that included several previous hurricanes.
“There’s not much you can do except wait,” Close said of the river crest. “At least there’s no rain forecast, no substantial rain. So here we have a break from all our rainy weather.
In coastal Pinellas County, the sheriff’s office used flood vehicles to transport people to their homes in a flooded Palm Harbor neighborhood where waters continued to rise.
Madeleine Jiron, her husband and their dog, Harry Potter, got into the sheriff’s truck for a ride around their neighborhood. After being evacuated to Tallahassee, they had just returned home.
“We don’t know what kind of damage we have,” Jiron said. “We’ll see when we get there.”
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