At least nine people have died as a result of Hurricane Milton hitting Florida, according to a new death toll released Thursday by local authorities, who are still trying to assess the damage after a storm of rain and wind that the US state has not yet considered over.
St. Lucie County has confirmed that five people have died from the tornadoes that hit the area. Two others have lost their lives in St. Petersburg, one in Volusia County and one more in Citrus, according to the American news channel CNN.
“We will know better what happened as the day progresses,” said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, explaining the deployment of emergency services in some of the counties most affected by the cyclone, which made landfall as a Category 1 storm. More than three million homes and businesses have been left without electricity throughout the state.
The National Hurricane Center (CNH) reported Thursday morning that the eye of ‘Milton’ is now 120 kilometers east of Cape Canaveral, although it continues to advance in the Atlantic Ocean with maximum sustained winds of 140 kilometers per hour. The CNH added that the tornadoes created by ‘Milton’ have been much more powerful than in previous situations.
For her part, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Deanne Criswell, has recognized that the Florida peninsula has avoided “the worst scenario” of all those that had been predicted, but that precisely having raised the alerts so much has served to avoid greater evils.
Criswell has stressed that the state will need financial help to deal with the devastation that ‘Milton’ has left in its wake, especially in the southwest area of ​​the peninsula, although far from the levels of destruction that were expected given the magnitude of the hurricane shortly before making landfall.
Milton is the fifth hurricane to make landfall in the United States this year and the third to hit Florida, which was already hit by Helene a few weeks ago.