Hurricane Milton’s live updates: Florida damage leaves 3 million without power, 5 dead. #hotnews.pt

At a Thursday afternoon briefing in Sarasota, DeSantis said that after flying over some of the hard-hit areas, he saw that many of the homes built in recent years fared well in the storm.

“Another thing I think I can say — our buildings that were built in the last 20 or 30 years, they did very well,” he said.

Also, crews are repairing leaks in the main terminal.

The airport said the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the control tower to resume full operations, roads and parking garages are in good shape, and there are no issues with the wastewater system. The airport’s fuel depot lost power and is running on generator power while repairs are underway.

The officers were investigating reports of a large tree branch that had fallen when they found the woman. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Tampa Police Chief Lee Bercaw said the death appeared to be the result of post-hurricane restoration efforts. The woman’s name wasn’t immediately released.

“Although the storm has passed, its devastation has tragically taken the life of one of our community members,” the police chief said.

But he stopped short of saying he’d order lawmakers to return from recess early.

Speaking to reporters at the White House about the federal response to Hurricane Milton’s destruction, Biden singled out urgent funding needed by the Small Business Administration, which offers low-cost loans to businesses damaged in storms.

“I think, in terms of the SBA, it’s pretty right at the edge right now,” Biden said. “And I think the Congress should be coming back and moving on emergency needs immediately.”

But asked directly if he was ordering Congress to return early, Biden was noncommittal, saying only, “I think congress should move as rapidly as they can.”

In Punta Gorda’s historic district, a 10-foot surge from the Peace River swept blocks inland, seriously damaging homes and depositing six 30-foot-plus boats along a quarter-mile stretch of a riverside street.

The surge was the third to hit the neighborhood the last three months, following a small surge by Hurricane Debby in August and an 8-foot surge by Helene two weeks ago.

Josh Baldwin’s 38-foot boat, Alexandra, named after his young daughter, was sitting upright on the street, resting on its hull and flattened propeller, leaning against a utility pole. One side had a large gash and along with the propeller, the shaft and other running gear were ruined. The cattle rancher had moored his boat at the marina about 100 yards away and the surge had picked it up and pushed it inland, pulling it off its moorings.

He said he was at home in Sarasota, 60 miles away Thursday morning, when a friend sent him a screenshot of a TV reporter doing a live shot from in front of it.

A few hours later, he was inside removing all the gear he could to avoid it being stolen and contemplating his options — pay $100,000 to fix the boat or scrap it. He was leaning toward scraping it.

He couldn’t get insurance because he had moored it in Punta Gorda.

“They don’t like to pay out and this place always gets ruined in hurricanes,” he said.

Addressing reporters Thursday about Hurricane Milton’s destruction, Biden said he wouldn’t call Trump directly. But when asked what his message would be for Trump, Biden squared his shoulders and more directly faced the camera.

“Mr. President Trump, former President Trump, get a life man,” Biden said. “Help these people.”

The White House, and Biden personally, have spent days decrying Trump for making false claims about disaster response, including that federal funding is being diverted for use on people in the country illegally and that such assistance is capped at $750.

“Inundation in excess of what we saw from Hurricane Helene a short while ago,” Emergency Management Director Patrick Fuller said Thursday afternoon during an update on damage from Hurricane Milton.

Fuller said power outages in the county, southeast of Tampa, peaked overnight at just over 97,000 and that there were just over 72,000 outages as of 2 p.m. Thursday. Two of three area hospitals were working to reopen. The third hospital was damaged by Hurricane Helene and will remain closed during repairs, Fuller said.

That’s according to Colorado State University senior research scientist Phil Klotzbach.

The others were in 1871, 1886, 1964, 2004 and, 2005.

In 2004, the state nearly had four hurricanes make landfall in a single year, Klotzbach said. But while Charley, Frances and Jeanne made landfall in Florida, Ivan made landfall in Alabama, just west of the Alabama-Florida border.

In Fort Pierce, Debbie Jones and her son’s girlfriend Megan Brown were cleaning up debris outside the house in Holiday Pines, a neighborhood damaged by tornadoes Wednesday afternoon ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall.

Jones said she was playing a card game in the house with her son, and Brown said she was working remotely in the back room of the house when suddenly the power went out. Jones’ son and his girlfriend both live in Tampa, and they’ve been staying with her for the past few weeks to evacuate from their apartment for hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Jones said she felt a pressure drop, and her ears were popping. At that moment, she knew it was a tornado.

“All of a sudden, the the power went out. I started hearing the wind pick up and debris start hitting very loudly. So I cranked the hurricane shutters shut and bolted out of there with them,” Brown said. From there, the entire family and their four dogs barricaded in the back of the house away from windows.

Jones said her property didn’t have any damage aside from piles of debris and she said a tree looked like it ripped off the ground next to her yard.

“We knew that there were warnings out because we kept getting them on the phone, but didn’t know it was going to happen,” Jones said of the tornadoes. “After it had happened and everybody’s kind of walking out scratching your head, it’s like, ‘Oh good, now we have a hurricane to deal with.’”

Universal Orlando and SeaWorld also say they’ll open their gates Friday.

Disney World said in a statement that its theme parks, Disney Springs, and possibly other areas will be open.

All three parks had shut down for at least part of Wednesday and all of Thursday. The parks said some Halloween special events won’t be offered and they won’t necessarily be fully functioning, but the public is welcome back.

The Tampa Bay Rays said it may take weeks to fully assess how much damage was done to Tropicana Field, which saw its roof ripped to shreds by the force of Hurricane Milton as the deadly storm barreled across Florida.

The team said no one was injured when the St. Petersburg ballpark was struck by the storm Wednesday night. A handful of “essential personnel” were inside Tropicana Field as the roof panels were blown apart, much of the debris falling on the field and seats below.

“Over the coming days and weeks, we expect to be able to assess the true condition of Tropicana Field,” the Rays said Thursday. “In the meantime, we are working with law enforcement to secure the building. We ask for your patience at this time, and we encourage those who can to donate to organizations in our community that are assisting those directly impacted by these storms.”

Meanwhile, the Orlando Magic were planning to spend Thursday in San Antonio and return home Friday, a day behind their original schedule for the week. The Magic played a preseason game in San Antonio on Wednesday night. They intended to fly home Thursday, arriving in Orlando in the early afternoon — those plans being scrapped because of Milton.

Also, a pair of college football games are set to be played Saturday in cities that dealt with some of Milton’s worst wind and rain, though there were some logistical issues that were still being discussed Thursday in the aftermath of the storm.

▶ Read more about the storm’s effects on sports teams.

The center of Post-Tropical Cyclone Milton continues to move away from the east coast of Florida and pass north of the northwestern Bahamas on Thursday afternoon.

Milton had maximum sustained winds of about 75 mph (120 kph), according to the National Hurricane Center.

Storm surge and tropical storm warnings have been discontinued south of the Flagler-Volusia County Line. It is, however, in effect for northward to Altamaha Sound in Georgia, including the St. Johns River. A Tropical Storm Warning is in effect for the Flagler-Volusia County line northward to Edisto Beach in South Carolina.

The government of the Bahamas has discontinued the Tropical Storm Warning for the extreme northwestern Bahamas.

Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, told reporters Thursday that more than 6,500 members of the Florida National Guard have been activated and an additional 3,000 from 19 states are ready to offer support.

He says 500-plus high-water vehicles, 26 helicopters and more than a dozen watercraft from 12 states have been mobilized for recovery from the storm.

And the Army Corps of Engineers has about 250 personnel working on temporary roof support, debris and flooding control, and more.

Hurricane Milton not only caused thousands of flight cancellations and delays, but it also shuttered most of Florida’s major airports. Here’s a list of when they’re expected to reopen:

Orlando International Airport

• The airport announced it ceased commercial operations ahead of the storm Wednesday and said it would resume as soon as it’s safe, based on damage assessments, according to a post on X.

Palm Beach Airport

• The Palm Beach International Airport announced on their website that it experienced no major damage to its facilities and it planned to resume operations Thursday at 1 p.m. for arriving flights.

Southwest Florida International Airport

Tampa International Airport

• A news release from the airport said staff are inspecting the condition of the airfield and facilities to determine when it will be safe to reopen. It plans to announce a reopening plan later Thursday, after the inspection has been completed.

Miami International Airport

• The Miami International Airport wasn’t in the direct path of the hurricane and remains open. However, it announced in a Facebook post that it’s seeing some cancellations and delays due to the weather.

Natasha Shannon and her husband Terry are feeling lucky to be alive after Hurricane Milton peeled the tin roof off of their modest cinderblock home in this working class neighborhood a few blocks north of the Manatee River, about a 45 minute drive south of Tampa.

Terry had resisted evacuating the three-bedroom house where he grew up and where the couple lived with their three kids and two grandkids. But as the storm barreled towards them Wednesday night, Natasha pushed him to leave — a decision she believes saved their lives.

“I said, ‘baby, we got to go. Because we’re not going to survive this’,” Natasha said.

“Imagine being in a house with no ceiling, no roof, no protection, nothing. At winds at 100 and what? No, I don’t think we’d still be here,” she said.

The tin roof of their home is now scattered in sheets across the street, the wooden beams of what was their ceiling exposed to the sky. Inside, fiberglass insulation hangs down in shreds, their belongings soaked by the rain and littered with chunks of shattered drywall.

“It ain’t much but it was ours. What little bit we did have is gone,” Natasha said. “It’s gone.”

The family was able to salvage a few things but said nearly everything else they own is destroyed. And none of it is insured.

The family said they and other evacuees were told they couldn’t continue to stay at the storm shelter Thursday night. As of Thursday afternoon, Manatee County’s website listed no open shelters. The cost of a hotel room is out of reach, they said, so they’ll all be cramming into Terry’s mother’s house for now. After that, they don’t know.

“I don’t have no answers,” Natasha said. “What is my next move? What am I going to do?”

Thousands of flights in and out of the U.S. have been canceled this week as Hurricane Milton barreled into the Gulf of Mexico and plowed across Florida — causing many airports to close their doors in the path of destruction.

And airlines across the country grounded flights as a result. There were more than 2,250 U.S. flight cancellations as of midday Thursday, according to tracking service FlightAware, following 1,970 on Wednesday.

After battering the southeastern U.S. and parts of Cuba Wednesday, the hurricane moved into the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday. Dangers still persist — with officials pointing to storm-surge warnings for much of Florida’s east-central coast and farther north into Georgia, for example, as well as tropical storm warnings reaching South Carolina. That means travel disruptions across the region will likely continue.

▶ Read more about flight cancellations.

Speaking at a White House briefing, Mayorkas said falsehoods are having a negative effect on survivors and hurting the morale of rescue workers. He noted a particular falsehood that federal employees will take the land of the people they’re helping, meaning that some victims of the storms are reticent to receive aid.

Mayorkas said the government is ” seeing horrific hate speech of all types, propagated on online platforms” pertaining to people trying to help address the damage from the storm as it’s been “a motivating force for people to do harm and it has got to stop.”

After keeping vigil most of the night for Hurricane Milton’s arrival in central Florida, Joella Krzyzanski was drifting off to sleep when she heard a boom around 5 a.m. Wednesday.

Looking out the window, she saw that an enormous 60-foot oak tree had smashed into a second-floor unit of her two-story garden apartment building in downtown Sanford. Her unit was downstairs from it. The impact shook the building and uprooted the sidewalk.

“It was almost like an explosion when it hit,” she said. “I was up like a light.” No one was hurt, and Krzyzanski said she will miss that tree.

“Storms happen,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Here’s some advice from experts about how to help:

— Send cash: The needs of people and organizations are evolving and won’t be fully known for days or weeks. Cash offers responders flexibility and can immediately be deployed to help.

— Give to charities already working in impacted communities: Local branches of the United Way will be directly serving people in the immediate aftermath of the storms. The Red Cross is also providing immediate shelter for tens of thousands of Floridians. They also urged people in areas proximate to the hurricane’s trajectory to donate blood if they are able. Grassroots and worker organizations, like those that serve immigrants, have already been providing critical information, translation and support to groups that may struggle to access state or government services.

— Consider waiting or signing up for recurring donations: It can often take months to truly scope the needs and challenges after disasters, especially as warming oceans caused by climate change are making hurricanes more intense. Communities face a long journey to recovery. Signing up to give even small donations regularly to local organizations helps those nonprofits plan, which can allow them to act more efficiently and effectively.

▶ Read more about how to help.

Feeding America CEO Claire Babineaux-Fontenot announced the donation from the “Gossip Girl” star and her “Deadpool” star husband in an Instagram post Thursday. They’re the latest celebrities to make a seven-figure donation after Taylor Swift gave $5 million earlier.

The mayor in St. Petersburg, Florida, warned residents cranes at several construction projects across the city might fall in Hurricane Milton and at the storm’s peak Wednesday night, one came crashing down.

No one was injured when the crane working on a 46-story condominium and office building — which will be the tallest residential tower on Florida’s Gulf coast — crashed into a nearby building where the Tampa Bay Times is located.

But the twisted metal gouged a hole where part of it came to rest in the brick and concrete on one corner of the building. Wires dangled down and bits of office items were strewn about. Another part of the crane blocked the street below. Nearby, Milton’s winds tore panels off the roof of Tropicana Field where baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays play.

No one was working in the newspaper office at the time of the collapse. City officials blocked off several blocks until they can completely assess the damage and begin working to remove the toppled and twisted crane.

▶ Read more about the toppled crane.

He said during a news conference in Lee County that he’s spoken with President Joe Biden, who pledged federal assistance for storm recovery efforts.

“He agreed with me that Congress needs to come back” to provide funding for federal agencies that respond to disasters, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, he said.

“We’ve got to get FEMA centers open all across the state closest to the people that are injured,” Scott said.

Sheriff Carmine Mancino said there have been no deaths reported in the county that includes Fort Myers, about 95 miles (153 kilometers) southeast of Tampa despite a tornado that struck the barrier islands.

County Commissioner Brian Hamman said there’s damage to homes in the area, but many are occupied by “snowbirds,” people who live in the area during the winter when temperatures are warmer than the colder northern states where they live during summer, and were not present.

The hardest hit areas include Cypress Creek and the Anclote River in Elfers. Both areas are currently forecast to be at a major flood stage.

Those officials included Sen. Rick Scott, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, Gainesville Mayor Harvey Ward, Fort Myers Mayor Kevin Anderson, Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and Pasco County Chair Ron Oakley.

The White House says the president told each of them to call him directly if they need additional assistance on rescue, response, and recovery efforts. Biden also emphasized that he will be with them and their communities – no matter how long it takes.

The White House says Biden will continue to be briefed about federal response and recovery efforts in the wake of both hurricanes Milton and Helene throughout the day.

One of the largest property owners on Anna Maria Island said two back-to-back hurricanes doesn’t give him pause about continuing to invest in the barrier island community.

With damage from Hurricane Milton less than what many feared, Shawn Kaleta said he expects guests to return to his rental properties as early as next Friday or Saturday.

Kaleta, who owns hotels, rental homes, restaurants and a trailer park, said his newly constructed houses — built to Florida’s robust building code — fared well under the hurricane-force winds, as designed. Meanwhile, many of the community’s beach bungalows were blown apart by Helene, and then battered again by Milton.

“The quaint Old Florida … they’re adorable,” he said, trailing off.

But many of those charming homes, which give places like Anna Maria Island their character, just can’t withstand these back-to-back storms.

“Sometimes you have to embrace what Mother Nature hands you.”

“He said he wants to be helpful, ” DeSantis said.

“He wants to help us get the job done,” he added.

Jessie Schaper, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Melbourne, Florida, said officials plan to begin their survey Friday, but it might take some time before results are released.

“It doesn’t mean there’s not going be a lot of damage, it doesn’t mean there’s not going to be a lot we’re going to have to contend with,” he said. “But, just in terms of what we were prepped for, I think we probably have an abundance of resources.”

“We’re also assessing the need for points of distribution. We typically will set up pods with water, food, tarps, things of that nature,” DeSantis said.

“We’ve got to keep bringing fuel into this state,” he said.

“We don’t have confirmed reports of other fatalities throughout the rest of the state, but we may as the day goes on.”

“As people know we’ve had massive power outages, which was expected,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a noon Thursday briefing. “I’d say this is probably similar to hurricane Ian and Irma in terms of the number of outages.”

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Thursday signed the state’s first relief package to address Hurricane Helene’s devastation, allocating $273 million for immediate needs and giving flexibility to agencies and displaced residents.

The Democrat signed the measure, approved unanimously Wednesday by the Republican-dominated General Assembly. Nearly all the money will serve as the state’s share that’s needed to meet the federal government’s match for state and local disaster assistance programs. Other money will be used in part to ensure public-school nutrition employees at closed schools get paid and to help officials administer elections in the coming weeks.

“Recovery for Western North Carolina will require unprecedented help from state and federal sources and this legislation is a strong first step,” Cooper said in a news release. The legislature also agreed separately Wednesday to return to Raleigh on Oct. 24, when action on additional recovery legislation is expected.

▶ Read more about the Helene relief legislation.

Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday evening as a Category 3 storm near Siesta Key, a barrier island of white sand beaches about 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of the Tampa Bay area, sparing a direct hit on the area that’s home to over 3.3 million people.

Gov. Ron DeSantis said Sarasota County, where Siesta Key is located, appears to have gotten the worst storm surge at 8 to 10 feet (2.5 to 3 meters). That’s lower than the worst place during Helene though.

By Thursday morning, Milton — weakened to a Category 1 storm, but still dangerous — had moved off Florida’s east coast.

The tiny barrier island of Matlacha, just off Fort Myers, got hit by both a tornado and surge from Milton, with many of the buildings sustaining serious damage.

Several collapsed or were knocked off their pilings. Utility poles snapped and there was no power Thursday morning. The fishing and tourism village also got severely hit by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago and Ian two years ago.

Ninety-year-old Tom Reynolds spent Thursday morning sweeping out the 4 feet of mud and water the surge deposited in his two-story home and collecting the large chunks of his home’s aluminum siding that had been ripped off by the tornado. Fortunately for Reynolds and others working outside Thursday, the temperatures were in the low 80s (mid-20s Celsius) and Milton had sucked away all the humidity.

The tornado, he said, had “picked up a car and thrown it across the road.” A house had been blown into another street, temporarily blocking it. Some structures caught fire.

Reynolds, who founded the glass and mirror company his son now runs, said he lost many of his power tools – he had stored them high in his shed, but the surge knocked it over.

He said plans to clean up his house, which he built three decade ago, get it fixed and stay.

“What else am I going to do?” Reynolds said.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office and Hillsborough County Fire Rescue were out with amphibious equipment and the marine unit rescuing residents, Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a video.

The video shows deputies in nearly waist-deep water outside the facility and residents with walkers being carried away on boats. The video shows flooded streets and parking lots and rescue workers with a boat floating next to a partially submerged flight of stairs helping an apartment building resident in a life jacket wrap up her cat.

Chronister can be seen offering to take a person in a home surrounded by floodwaters to dry ground.

“This is extraordinary to see this type of flooding, especially in this type of area. The University of South Florida area is normally a dry area,” Chronister said in the video. “To see this unprecedented flooding, I can only imagine how scary it was.”

Many Jews worldwide will mark Yom Kippur in fasting and prayer at their synagogues this weekend.

But for the faithful in Florida, destructive Hurricane Milton has disrupted plans for observing the Day of Atonement — the holiest day of the year in the Jewish faith — that begins Friday evening and caps off the High Holy Days that began with Rosh Hashana on Oct. 2.

Across the storm-threatened areas, rabbis and their congregants spent part of the Days of Awe — the span between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur — protecting their homes and synagogues as Milton churned off the coast. Many — though not all — evacuated, heeding the voluntary and mandatory orders, and found safekeeping for their synagogues’ Torah scrolls and themselves.

▶ Read more about the storm’s disruption to Yom Kippur.

The roof panels over the home of baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays were ripped to shreds by the force of Hurricane Milton, with debris littering the field and much of the seating areas Thursday after the deadly storm barreled across the state.

Team officials said only a handful of “essential personnel” were inside Tropicana Field, located in St. Petersburg, when the storm hit. Aerial images showed the swaths that serve as the domed building’s roof were completely tattered, giving a clear line of sight inside the stadium.

Sections of the roof — some relatively small, some large enough to cover several rows of seats — fell inside the ballpark.

No injuries at the stadium were reported. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had said earlier in the week that there were plans for the ballpark to serve as a “temporary base camp” to support debris cleanup operations and temporarily house some first responders. But those plans were changed as the storm neared, amid concerns the roof simply would not survive Milton’s wrath.

▶ Read more about damage to Tropicana Field.

In the Spring Oaks neighborhood of Altamonte Springs, north of Orlando, an impromptu lake formed from floodwaters on a residential street, just feet from Rupert and Ernine Gonzales’ split-level home.

They’ve lived in their house for 22 years, but never saw flooding until two years ago with Hurricane Ian. Now, it’s becoming more regular.

“The city must do something about this flooding, 100%,” Rupert Gonzales said. “People here have gotten flooded, relocated, come back and gotten flooded again. It’s a way of life, it seems.”

Sooner or later, people won’t want to buy homes in his neighborhood, Gonzales said. “I’m very concerned because I have to live here and I have to see this flooding every time.”

It was a “sigh of relief” when Police Chief John Cosby came across the bridge from the mainland to Anna Maria Island Thursday morning and didn’t see his community underwater.

“Very close to 100%” of residents evacuated this town ahead of Hurricane Milton, he said, after Hurricane Helene battered this barrier island community just two weeks ago, covering the streets with piles of sand like snowbanks from a blizzard.

“So far, knock on wood, we’ve had no injuries and no deaths in our community,” from Hurricane Milton he said.

While wind from Milton battered already damaged homes and knocked at least one multi-story home off its pilings, the projected storm surge didn’t hit here, he said.

“Nine, 15 feet of storm surge on top of 22-foot waves … my police department … would’ve been underwater,” he said.

Instead, he said the building is dry.

“It’s nice to have a place to come back to.”

Piles of debris from Hurricane Helene still line the streets here, seemingly where residents left them before Milton came ashore. Mattresses, refrigerators, stacks of plates, boxes of fishing gear, some scattered but others still sit in their heaps — a mess, but not the barrage of hurricane-driven missiles so many residents had feared.

“Several areas in Charlotte County are still experiencing significant flooding and hazards may not be visible,” the county’s Emergency Management office said on X. “We urge everyone to stay off roads until further notice. There is no guarantee any road on the way to or from any location in the county will not have some level of flooding or dangerous debris.”

A manufacturer of IV fluids critical to hospitals nationwide said Thursday that its Florida factory and distribution center were left intact after Hurricane Milton tore through the state.

B. Braun Medical Inc. said it would provide more details later Thursday about the Daytona Beach factory. The company had said earlier this week that it planned to restart production Friday morning.

The factory is seen as an important source of sterile intravenous, or IV, fluid supplies that had grown tight after Hurricane Helene hit Florida and several other states late last month. That storm forced Baxter International to shut down a North Carolina factory that makes about 60% of the country’s IV fluid supply.

That plant also makes fluids used by patients on home kidney dialysis.

▶ Read more about the IV fluid factory.

The Port St. Lucie Utility Systems issued a precautionary boil water notice Thursday morning. Officials say more than 64,000 customers are without power. In response to a growing need for shelter, the county opened an additional space at Fort Pierce Central High School.

The county is home to more than 500,000 people in bedroom communities for Tampa and St. Petersburg.

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office says it has received more than 140 calls regarding roadway obstructions. After pausing during the worst periods of the storm, Pasco County Fire Rescue fully said it had resumed emergency response operations Thursday.

The base, which is home to U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, has about 185 personnel working at an emergency operations center out of Raymond James Stadium. There were 13 KC-135 aircraft evacuated to McConnell Air Force Base, and other aircraft remained in hangars or away on military missions.

A Hurricane Recovery Team is heading to the base to begin assessing damages and Air Forces Northern is working to provide Civil Air Patrol flyovers to get an aerial view of the base.

Aircraft were also moved out of Patrick Space Force Base but there was no personnel evacuation ordered. Space Launch Delta 45 has a team doing damage assessments. Also, seven F-16 fighter jets from the 482nd Fighter Wing were moved from Homestead Air Reserve Base to San Antonio.

The U.S. Navy says there was “negligible damage” at the Mayport, Jacksonville and Kings Bay naval bases and they’re expected to return to normal operations Thursday.

Tapfumaneyi says roads are being cleared and residents should remain in place.

Tapfumaneyi said the storm surge appears to be less than initially forecast.

In Bradenton, city workers were feeling grateful not to be wading through deep floodwaters as they picked up storm debris Thursday morning in this beach town on Anna Maria Island, where just two weeks ago Hurricane Helene battered homes and businesses and blew in piles of sand along the city’s streets.

“Best way to describe it is like getting 4-6 feet of snow up north,” said Jeremi Roberts of the State Emergency Response Team.

Local residents had feared that the loss of the sand along the beach may have left it more vulnerable to further erosion from Milton, in this community where wooden beach bungalows still stand among newer two- and three-story houses. But Roberts said the piles of sand may have helped shield homes from further damage from Milton.

“I’m shocked it’s not more,” said city worker Kati Sands as she cleared the streets of pieces of siding and broken lights. “We lost so much with Helene, there wasn’t much left.”

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The White House said DeSantis told Biden they’re still evaluating the damage to his state. The White House said FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell would join DeSantis in surveying the damage Thursday morning before briefing Biden on the results.