Hurricane Milton It made landfall in Florida early Thursday as a category three hurricane, although it was quickly downgraded to category two. The storm entered the west coast of Florida, near the town of Siesta Key, with torrential rain and winds of up to 193 kilometers per hour. Just hours after it appeared, more than two million homes were already without electricity, according to the poweroutage website. Sarasota County, where Milton arrived, is one of the places with the most power outages.
In Martin County, authorities have already reported multiple injuries and dozens of homes damaged by strong wind gusts and torrential rain, CNN reported early this morning. Before Milton made landfall, Florida Division of Emergency Services Director Kevin Guthrie said more than 100 homes had already been destroyed by tornadoes in the central and southern parts of the peninsula before the outbreak. arrival of the storm. In the city of St. Lucie, which belongs to this county, local authorities confirmed several deaths following the tornadoes, according to the Associated Press.
The St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department told WPTV that “multiple deaths” occurred at the Spanish Lakes Country Club, a senior living community. St. Lucia Chief Sheriff Keith Pearson acknowledged that it is not clear how many people died and that emergency crews deployed a search and rescue operation to each of the affected homes before the arrival of the rains from Milton.
“We have dozens of homes in St. Lucie County that have been damaged, some of them catastrophically,” St. Lucie County spokesperson Erick Gill told WFLA.
At least 19 tornadoes were recorded this Wednesday in central and southern Florida, hours before Hurricane Milton made landfall on Siesta Key, on the west coast of Florida (United States).
The national emergency agency reported that in the past few hours up to 125 houses, mostly mobile homes, were destroyed.
Although downgraded to category 2, authorities continue to warn of the danger of the hurricane. In the 11 p.m. update (five a.m. in Spain), the National Hurricane Center reported that Milton “will maintain hurricane intensity as it crosses Florida” in the coming hours, until leaving the east coast Thursday. As it leaves the Atlantic, it is expected to gradually lose strength and weaken.
In the city of St. Petersburg, torrential rains carried by Milton left behind 0.4 meters in the first two hours, according to CNN. As it continues to move toward Florida as a category two hurricane, new emergency warnings have been activated for flash flooding in the Tampa area. In this city of around 400,000 inhabitants, the mayor was very direct about the prognosis: “I can say, without dramatizing at all, that if you decide to stay in one of these evacuation zones, you will die. »
At five o’clock in the afternoon local time, Florida authorities informed citizens that it was too late to evacuate the area and recommended that people seek shelter as best they could. . “It is too dangerous to evacuate safely, so shelter should be sought,” said Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
In recent days, authorities have issued a mandatory evacuation order affecting more than 5 million people. “It’s a matter of life and death,” US President Joe Biden said on Tuesday afternoon, after Milton suddenly reached Category 5 again, the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
The hurricane formed quickly in the Gulf of Mexico last weekend and is the second to hit the United States in less than two weeks, after Helene, which left more than 200 dead in its wake. The damage caused by Helen has already forced the federal government to declare Florida an emergency, which has further generated concern about possible damage caused by Milton.
Milton comes at a time when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is at its lowest ebb. Earlier in the week, the agency announced it was short on available staff in the wake of the hurricane. Helene. Currently, the agency has less than 10% of its staff available to respond to a new disaster situation. Over the past five years, at least a quarter of the agency’s staff was available when hurricane season hit.
