The powerful Hurricane Milton hit Florida with heavy rains and tornadoes and caused deaths, flooding and destruction in coastal cities such as Sarasota, Tampa and St. Petersburg and then lowered its intensity as it moved towards the interior of the peninsula, where it also hit with strong storms. to Orlando.
Almost three million people were without power this Thursday morning and the number of victims remains undetermined, but they have already been reported. “multiple deaths” at a senior living community in Port St Lucie.
Milton made landfall on Wednesday at 9:30 p.m., Argentine time, in Siesta Key, a coastal paradise of white sands and one of the best beaches in the United States, as a category 3 hurricane, with winds of almost 200 kilometers per hour and preceded by dozens of tornadoes that tore the region apart.
The eye of the hurricane passed a few kilometers south of Tampa, the most populated city in the area, and that prevented the damage from being greater. Likewise, Milton caused strong waves that flooded the streets from that coastal city and others such as Sarasota, Fort Myers Beach, Naples and St Petersburg.
At midnight Milton was downgraded to Category 2 while heading to the interior of the peninsula, also with strong winds of 170 km per hour and upon reaching the south of Orlando, around 3 in the morning, it was downgraded to Category 1, with rain. persistent. In that area, DisneyWorld and other attractions remained closed as of Wednesday afternoon.
Near dawn, the hurricane was already entering the Atlantic.
“Multiple deaths”
As the hours go by and as the waters recede, Milton’s impact on human lives and destruction will be known with certainty. But some tragedies are already beginning to be revealed. Keith Pearson, sheriff of St Lucie County, on the east coast, confirmed to CNN that “multiple deaths” occurred at Spanish Lakes Country Club, a retirement community where seniors live.
Without giving details about the number of victims, the official noted that emergency teams were searching each of the homes affected by a tornado prior to the arrival of the hurricane that devastated the neighborhood.
In St. Petersburg, almost 50 centimeters of rain fell and the streets were flooded on Wednesday night, while strong winds blew off the roof of the Tropicana Field stadium, where the local Tampa Bay Rays baseball team plays, with capacity for 45,000 people, which at night looked spectral without its cover. The stadium was prepared to house rescue and emergency workers these days.
In Miami, refugees at home
While that horror movie was taking place in the center of the peninsula, further south the inhabitants of Miami remained sheltered inside their homes, many of them boarded up or with special closures for hurricanes, on a night of strong winds and storms, but with much less intensity than in the most affected areas.
Florida residents seem cursed by hurricanes and are suffering one of the worst seasons in their history: Milton is the fifth to make landfall in the US this year, after category 1 Beryl and Debby, category 2 Francine and Helene category 4, just weeks ago, and which, in addition to Florida, spread through Georgia and North Carolina and caused at least 230 deaths.
President Biden had anticipated that Milton could be “the worst storm in Florida in a century” and called on Americans in risk areas to “evacuate now, now, now.”
“It is a matter of life or death,” added the president, who suspended a trip to Germany and Angola this week due to the emergency.
The impact on the electoral campaign
A few weeks before the presidential elections, Hurricanes Helene and Milton may have an impact on the campaign. The Republican candidate Donald Trump and some of his far-right allies have made it a topic on social networks and at political events these days, with conspiracy theories on the government’s impact on the climate and with false accusations of defunding the agency that intervenes in disasters (FEMA) to send money to immigrants.
“Western North Carolina, and the entire state, for that matter, has been totally and incompetently mismanaged by Harris and Biden,” Trump said Wednesday on his Truth Social network. “Hang in there and vote these horrible ‘public servants’ out of office,” he added.
Democratic candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris responded to Trump on a TV show Tuesday night: “Don’t you have empathy for people’s suffering?” she scolded him.