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 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’s deaths.
“It was pretty scary,” said Susan Stepp, a 70-year-old resident of Fort Pierce, a city on Florida’s Atlantic coast where four people died in a tornado spawned …