As Floridians return, officials size up Milton’s uneven trail of destruction

Florida residents on Friday returned to neighborhoods stricken by power outages and filled with piles of soggy, stinking debris as tens of thousands of emergency workers began repairing the destruction caused by Hurricane Milton.

The state’s leaders said Friday that initial assessments were that the damage inflicted by the storm, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane Wednesday night south of Sarasota, was not as catastrophic as experts had feared, in large part because a dreaded surge of seawater around Tampa Bay never materialized.

“We did not get the worst-case scenario — but we did get hit,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news briefing Friday.

The storm cut an uneven path of damage across the state, submerging whole neighborhoods on the Gulf Coast while leaving others largely untouched and demolishing homes in unpredictable lines of tornadoes that tore through parts near the Atlantic Coast.

More than a dozen deaths were linked to the storm, with many of those occurring in places on the peninsula that had not expected to bear the brunt of the impact.

On the eastern side of the state, tornadoes spawned by Milton killed at least six people in St. Lucie County, including some at a mobile home retirement community, and damaged dozens of homes in Martin County, to the south of St. Lucie.

The death toll also included a man in Orange County, which includes Orlando, who stepped on a downed power line, and a woman in Tampa who was killed late Thursday night when two cars collided in a dark area where the traffic signal was inoperative.

But at least so far, none of the fatalities reported have been from drowning, a surprising fact given officials’ earlier fears about potentially record-setting storm surge.

The state deployed around two dozen search-and-rescue teams, and in total more than 1,600 people were rescued by state and local emergency workers, the governor said.

Although waters were receding in some communities, flooding remained a significant issue in other pockets of the state, including parts of Hillsborough County on the west coast, sections of Volusia and Lake counties in central Florida, and smaller inland communities along the St. Johns River, which runs from central Florida north to Jacksonville and surged after Milton.

Across large swaths of the state, many schools remained closed and gasoline was in short supply, with lines of cars snaking down the block at some service stations that had gas and the electricity to pump it. The storm tore the roof off the stadium that is home to the Tampa Bay Rays, the Major League Baseball team, and sent a construction crane crashing against a building in St. Petersburg.

As of Friday evening, more than 2.1 million customers in Florida were still without power, according to poweroutages.us. But officials said that the state’s electricity grid did not sustain significant damage and predicted that power would soon be restored.

“I am here to tell you: This is not weeks. This is days,” Melissa Seixas, the state president of Duke Energy in Florida, said at a news conference Friday.

About 1,500 people remained in shelters Friday in Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, with more than 170 of them having been there since Hurricane Helene about two weeks ago, the county’s emergency management director, Cathie Perkins, said during a news briefing.

In one shelter, the population unexpectedly grew by one, with the birth of “a beautiful baby girl,” Perkins said.

“Just beautiful to see that new life in the middle of all of this destruction,” she added.

Dozens of hospitals across Florida were attempting to reopen, and thousands of displaced patients and nursing home residents were hunkered down in temporary quarters as emergency crews assessed the damage from the storm and worked to restore power, according to state officials.

More than 160 health care facilities across the state lost power because of the hurricane, according to the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

But overall, officials said, health care facilities in the path of the storm appeared to have fared better than expected.

Most hospitals in the region had escaped serious damage, they said, in part because of lessons learned from the many hurricanes that have swept through the state in recent years.

Across Florida, there were signs of a relatively rapid return to operations for key parts of the state’s economy. Disney World, Universal Orlando Resort and SeaWorld, all of which closed as the storm approached Wednesday, reopened Friday.

Both Orlando International Airport and Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers were fully operational Friday.

Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, a smaller airport that was directly in the path of the storm, said it would remain closed until Wednesday because it needed extensive repairs.

Coastal neighborhoods that were badly flooded by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago were drenched again, the detritus of those storms fouled by mold and sewage.

Beyond the burden and suffering inflicted on homeowners, the question of how much property damage Milton caused is critical both economically and politically in Florida.

In recent years, as the country’s largest insurance companies have fled the state, homeowners have been forced to take policies with smaller companies and the state’s nonprofit lender of last resort, the Citizens Property Insurance Corp. This year, DeSantis warned that Citizens was “not solvent,” raising the prospect of further increases in insurance rates across the state and the political backlash that could ensue.

Experts worry that a crisis in the state’s insurance market could have repercussions well beyond Florida. If insurers were unable to pay out insurance claims, and homeowners defaulted on their mortgages, Congress could face pressure to provide assistance. And if insurers saw large enough losses, premiums for homeowners in other parts of the country could go up in response, as the industry tries to shore up its financial position.

Moody’s, the credit rating agency, said Thursday that it would be weeks before insurers had reliable estimates of the damage caused by Milton, the third hurricane to make landfall in Florida this year.

Hurricane Debby, in early August, caused an estimated $1.5 billion in damage, according to Moody’s. And Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in northwestern Florida on Sept. 26 and caused a storm surge along the west coast of the peninsula, is estimated to have caused $6 billion to $14 billion of damage, according to Moody’s.

Flooding remained a problem well inland in some areas on Friday. On Horse Lovers Lane in Altamonte Springs, north of Orlando, a field had been transformed into a lake when the swollen Little Wekiva River overran its banks. There were no horses to be seen Friday. But an alligator peered out from the floodwaters.

“Our houses are nice and strong,” said Diane Bustamonte, 75, an Altamonte resident. “We withstand all the storms.”

“And then all of a sudden, it just comes. The Little Wekiva.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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