Hurricane Milton slams Florida; 3 million without power

Hurricane Milton brought flooding rains and damaging winds to central and northern Florida on Thursday, destroying homes and leaving at least four people dead and 3 million without power before moving into the Atlantic Ocean.

The storm made landfall late Wednesday near Siesta Key in Sarasota County as a Category 3 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of up to 205 kilometers per hour.

It spent the night plowing across the state, prompting authorities to issue flash flood emergencies, before the center of the storm emerged in the Atlantic Ocean a few hours before sunrise Thursday.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said an area in northern Florida could receive 5-10 centimeters of additional rainfall Thursday, as the storm moved away from the state and moved into the ocean.

St. Petersburg, a city on Florida’s west coast near the landfall site, recorded 41 centimeters of rain, eight times the city’s monthly average for October.

The hurricane also brought storm surge – inundation of water from the coast to inland areas – to the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota and Fort Myers.

Power was knocked out to more than 3 million residents and businesses, and utility companies warned that outages could last for an extended period of time.

“We will better understand the extent of the damage as the day progresses,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis told reporters Thursday. “The storm was significant, but thankfully, this was not the worst-case scenario.”

The National Weather Service in Miami posted photographs of tornadoes on the social media platform X and said that Florida was experiencing “a very favorable environment for quick-moving and dangerous tornadoes.”

The agency issued more than 50 tornado warnings by Wednesday afternoon.

Emergency management officials said at least 125 homes were destroyed, many of them mobile homes.

Roads were busy Monday and Tuesday as people followed mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders to escape the hurricane’s path, while those choosing to stay made final preparations to endure the storm.

Milton’s arrival in Florida comes just two weeks after Hurricane Helene hit the state.

Some information for this report came from Reuters, The Associated Press and Agence France-Presse.