Hurricane Milton made its way into the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday, after cutting a devastating path across the state of Florida, causing more than a dozen tornadoes, damaging homes and killing at least four people.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said in a press briefing that the state had avoided the worst possibilities, but warned that the damage was still significant. The Tampa Bay area appeared to have been spared the storm that prompted the most severe warnings to be issued.
St. Lucie spokesman Eric Gill said that the four deaths occurred in this county on the east coast of Florida, including at least two in the Spanish Lakes community, a group of retirement neighborhoods, when the hurricanes hit the area on Wednesday evening.
He added that it was not yet clear whether the two other deaths occurred in Spanish Lakes as well.
De Santis said that 19 hurricanes had been confirmed in Florida as of 8 p.m. yesterday, Wednesday, which was approximately the same time that Hurricane Milton made landfall. The National Weather Service said about 45 tornadoes were spotted throughout the day, most of them in the central and eastern parts of the state.
Poweroutage.us reported that electricity was cut off to more than three million homes and businesses in Florida on Thursday morning. At least some of them had been waiting for several days for the return of electricity after Hurricane Helen struck the region about two weeks ago.
Storm “Milton” hit the west coast of Florida on Wednesday evening as a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with maximum wind speeds of 205 kilometers per hour. The storm remains dangerous, but Milton has arrived less violent than the rare Category 5 storm that threatened the state as it advances over the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida.
The US National Hurricane Center said that Milton’s strength declined further as it crossed land, and it descended into a Category 1 hurricane with sustained winds reaching a maximum speed of 145 kilometers per hour when it reached the eastern coast of the peninsula. By this morning, the storm was moving away from Florida’s Atlantic coast after hitting communities on the East Coast.
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