BRANDON, Fla. — Florida residents who fled hundreds of miles to escape Hurricane Milton made slow journeys home on busy highways, tired from their long journeys and the cleanup work that awaited them, but also grateful to have returned alive.
“I love my house, but it’s not going to kill me,” Fred Neuman said Friday as he walked his dog at a rest stop on Interstate 75 north of Tampa.
Neuman and his wife live in Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall Wednesday evening as a powerful Category 3 hurricane. They followed local evacuation orders and drove nearly 500 miles to Destin on the Florida Panhandle ahead of the storm. Neighbors told the couple that the hurricane destroyed their carport and caused other damage, but Neuman shrugged it off and said their insurance should cover it.
Nearby, Lee and Pamela Essenburm made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a picnic table as cars pulling off the slow-moving highway waited in parking spots outside the busy rest area. At their home in Palmetto, on the south side of Tampa Bay, a tree fell in the backyard. They evacuated for fear the damage would be more severe, as they feared Milton would hit as a catastrophic Category 4 or 5 storm.
“I wasn’t going to take a chance on it,” Lee Essenbaum said. “It’s not worth it.”
Milton killed at least 10 people as it tore through Central Florida, flooding the barrier islands and ripping the roof off the coast. Tampa Bay Rays ′ baseball stadium and cause deadly tornadoes.
Officials say the toll could have been worse if not for widespread evacuations. The still-fresh devastation caused by Hurricane Helene just two weeks earlier likely prompted many people to flee.
“Helene was probably a stark reminder of how vulnerable certain areas are to storms, especially coastal areas,” said Craig Fugate, who served as administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama. “If people see firsthand what can happen, especially in neighboring areas, it could change behavior in future storms.”
In the resort town of Punta Gorda, Mayor Lynne Matthews said rescuers only had to rescue three people from the water after Milton passed, compared to 121 rescues after the Helene flood.
“So people listened to the evacuation order,” Matthews told a news conference Friday, noting that local authorities made sure residents heard them. “We had crews going through all of our mobile home communities and other places with the bullhorns letting people know to evacuate.”
As of Friday evening, the number of Florida customers still without power had dropped to 1.9 million poweroutage.us. St. Petersburg’s 260,000 residents were required to boil water before drinking, cooking or brushing their teeth until at least Monday.
Traffic slowed to a crawl along stretches of I-75 as evacuees’ vehicles jostled alongside a steady stream of trucks heading south toward Tampa. While the densely populated city and surrounding Hillsborough County were responsible for nearly a quarter of the remaining power outages, the hurricane spared Tampa a direct hit and the deadly storm surge that scientists feared never came true.
However, Governor Ron DeSantis warned people not to let their guard down, citing lingering safety risks including downed power lines and standing water that could conceal dangerous objects.
“We are now in a period where there are preventable fatalities,” DeSantis said Friday. “You have to make the right decisions and know that there are dangers.”
In the coastal town of Pinellas County, the sheriff’s office used high-water vehicles to ferry people back and forth to their homes in a flooded Palm Harbor neighborhood, where water continued to rise.
Madeleine Jiron, her husband and their dog, Harry Potter, climbed into the sheriff’s truck for a ride to their neighborhood. After evacuating to Tallahassee, they just arrived home.
“We don’t know what kind of damage we have,” Jiron said. “We’ll see when we get there.”
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Farrington reported from St. Petersburg. Associated Press journalists Chris O’Meara in Lithia, Florida; Curt Anderson in Tampa; Terry Spencer outside Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Stephany Matat in Fort Pierce, Fla.; Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale; and Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed.
