 "hurricane")
Officials say the damage could have been even worse without mass evacuations. The still fresh devastation wrought by Hurricane Helen just two weeks ago likely helped many people were forced to evacuate. Photo: Shutterstock
A Florida resident who fled hundreds of miles to escape Hurricane Milton slowly made his way home along a busy highway, tired from the long journey and the cleanup that awaited him, but also grateful to make it home alive.
“I don’t know what to do,” Fred Newman said Friday as he walked his dog outside a rest stop along Interstate 75 north of Tampa.
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Newman and his wife live on Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall Wednesday night as a powerful Category 3 hurricane. Following local evacuation orders ahead of the storm, they drove nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) to Destin along the Florida Panhandle. Neighbors told the couple that their carport was destroyed and other damage was sustained in the hurricane, but Newman shrugged that it would be covered by insurance.
Nearby, Lee and Pamela Essenbaum were making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a picnic table as cars slowed down the highway and waited for a parking space outside a crowded rest area. A tree fell in the backyard of a home in Palmetto on the southern tip of Tampa Bay. They evacuated, fearing the damage would be even more severe and fearing Milton would be hit by a devastating Category 4 or 5 storm.
I wasn’t going to bet on it, Lee Essenbaum said. It’s not worth it.
Milton tore through central Florida, flooding barrier islands, ripping the roof off the Tampa Bay Rays baseball stadium and spawning deadly tornadoes that killed at least 10 people.
Officials say the toll could have been worse without mass evacuations. The devastation wrought by Hurricane Helen just two weeks ago is still fresh in our minds, and likely forced many people to evacuate.
Craig Fugate, who served as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama, said Helen likely served as a stark reminder of how vulnerable certain regions, especially coastal areas, are to storms. said. When people see first-hand what can happen, especially in their neighborhoods, it could encourage behavioral changes during future storms.
In the seaside town of Punta Gorda, Mayor Lynn Matthews said after Milton’s death, rescuers were only able to pull three people out of the floodwaters, compared to 121 people rescued in Helen’s floodwaters.
So people heeded evacuation orders, Matthews said at a news conference Friday, noting that local officials checked with residents to make sure they heard them. We sent out teams with megaphones to patrol all mobile home communities and other locations, informing people of the need to evacuate.
As of Friday night, the number of customers still without power in Florida had fallen to 1.9 million, according to poweroutage.us. St. Petersburg’s 260,000 residents have been told to boil water before drinking, cooking or brushing their teeth until at least Monday.
Traffic was significantly reduced along Interstate 75, with evacuee vehicles jammed alongside utility trucks headed south toward Tampa. The densely populated city and surrounding Hillsborough County accounted for nearly a quarter of the remaining power outages, but the hurricane avoided Tampa and the deadly storm surge that scientists had feared did not materialize. Ta.
But Gov. Ron DeSantis warned people not to let their guard down, citing continuing safety threats, including downed power lines and standing water that could hide dangerous objects.
“We are now entering an era of preventable deaths,” DeSantis said Friday. You have to make good decisions and know that there are risks.
In coastal Pinellas County, the sheriff’s office used high-water vehicles to transport people to and from their homes in the flooded Palm Harbor area, where waters continue to rise.
Madeline Giron, her husband, and their dog Harry Potter boarded a sheriff’s truck to head to their neighborhood. They had just arrived home after being evacuated to Tallahassee.
We don’t know what kind of damage there will be, Giron said. Let’s take a look when we arrive.
(Only the headline and photo in this report may have been reworked by Business Standard staff. The rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
First publication date: October 12, 2024 | 10:15 AM IST
