The death toll from Hurricane Milton rose to at least 16 on Friday, officials in Florida said, as residents began the painful process of piecing their lives and homes back together. Nearly 2.5 million households and businesses were still without power, and some areas in the path cut through the Sunshine State by the monster storm from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean remained flooded. Milton crashed into the Florida Gulf Coast late on Wednesday as a Category 3 storm, with powerful winds smashing communities still reeling from Hurricane Helene two weeks ago, which killed 237 people across the US southeast, including in Florida. So far, though, it appeared that tornadoes, rather than floodwaters, were responsible for many of the storm\u2019s deaths. \u201cIt was pretty scary,\u201d said Susan Stepp, a 70-year-old resident of Fort Pierce, a city on Florida\u2019s Atlantic coast where four people died in a tornado spawned by Milton. \u201cThey did find some people just outside dead, in a tree,\u201d she told AFP. \u201cI wish they would have evacuated.\u201d Stepp\u2019s husband Bill said a tornado \u201cpicked up my 22-ton motor home and threw it across the yard.\u201d \u201cScary and heartbreaking at the same time, to see much damage and all things you really love just gone, but it\u2019s only things, and we\u2019re still here,\u201d the 72-year-old said. At least six people were killed in St Lucie County, four in Volusia County, two in Pinellas County, and one each in Hillsborough, Polk, Orange and Citrus counties, local officials said. The storm downed power lines, shredded the roof of the Tampa baseball stadium and inundated homes, but Florida was able to avoid the level of catastrophic devastation that officials had feared. \u201cThe storm was significant, but thankfully this was not the worst-case scenario,\u201d Governor Ron DeSantis told a news conference. The National Weather Service issued 126 tornado warnings across the state on Wednesday, the most ever issued for a single calendar day for the state in records dating back to 1986, wrote hurricane expert Michael Lowry. \u201cIt is not easy to think you have everything and suddenly you have nothing,\u201d said Lidier Rodriguez, who was forced to leave his flooded apartment near Tampa Bay. \u2018Get a life\u2019 Search operations were ongoing on Friday, and the Coast Guard reported the spectacular rescue of a boat captain who rode out the storm clinging to a cooler in the Gulf of Mexico. \u201cThis man survived in a nightmare scenario for even the most experienced mariner,\u201d Dana Grady, the US Coast Guard\u2019s Sector St Petersburg command centre chief, said in a statement. President Joe Biden on Thursday urged people to stay inside in the aftermath of the storm, with downed power lines and debris creating dangerous conditions. In a video posted on social media, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said he and his wife Melania were praying for Florida residents affected by the storm and urged them to vote for him. \u201cHopefully, on January 20th you\u2019re going to have somebody that\u2019s really going to help you and help you like never before,\u201d the former president said, referring to the presidential inauguration date. Hurricane Helene struck Florida late last month, and the back-to-back storms have become election fodder as Trump spreads conspiracy theories claiming Biden and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris are abandoning victims. Biden snapped back on Thursday, telling Trump to \u201cget a life.\u201d \u2018Wake-up call\u2019 Scientists say extreme rainfall and destructive storms are occurring with greater severity and frequency as temperatures rise due to climate change. As warmer ocean surfaces release more water vapour, they provide more energy for storms as they form. \u201cThere is no question it needs to be a serious wake-up call for everyone in terms of climate change,\u201d Kristin Joyce, a 72-year-old interior designer, told AFP in Sarasota Bay as she surveyed the damage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The death toll from Hurricane Milton rose to at least 16 on Friday, officials in Florida said, as residents began the painful process of piecing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20224,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}