Storm surge and tropical storm warnings were no longer in effect, but flooding was still possible along Georgia’s southern coastline Thursday evening as Hurricane Milton moved into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving death and destruction in its wake.
The powerful cyclone storm made landfall as a Category 3 storm around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday near Florida’s Siesta Key, a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Sarasota, the National Hurricane Center said. At that level, it still qualified as a major hurricane, but it was down from its Category 5 peak.
As of the NHC’s 5 p.m. update Thursday, the center of the now post-tropical cyclone is over the Atlantic about 220 miles north-northeast of the Bahamas. It was moving east at about 21 mph with sustained winds of 70 mph.
While Milton continues moving away from the coast, its counterclockwise motion is expected to push water onto the coasts from central Florida all the way to the Altamaha Sound in Georgia. While storm warnings were no longer in effect, officials said the water level could reach up to 3 feet above ground in those areas.
“Coastal flooding is expected to continue along portions of the southeastern U.S. coast through tonight,” the NHC said.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a Thursday morning news conference that the storm was “significant, but thankfully, this was not the worst-case scenario.”
“The storm did weaken before landfall, and the storm surge as initially reported has not been as significant overall as what was observed for Hurricane Helene,” he said, but added that water could continue to rise for days. Milton will continue to weaken as it passes to the south of Bermuda late Friday, the NHC added.
Sarasota County had the highest storm surge at 8 to 10 feet, the governor said. With Helene, surges grew to 15 to 20 feet in Taylor County.
Still, widespread devastation has been left behind after Milton ravaged the peninsula, spawning several tornadoes that left multiple people dead. Just in the Fort Pierce area, DeSantis confirmed five people were killed when a tornado broke out before Milton even made landfall.
It’s not unusual for tornadoes to occur amid hurricanes, but the number and intensity were out of the norm, Channel 2 Action News meteorologist Brian Monahan said. And with the National Weather Service’s Florida offices issuing 126 tornado warnings Wednesday, it was “the second-most tornado warnings in a day, any time of the year, any place,” he said. “That is so unusual.”
Tornado warnings mean only that one has been sighted or indicated by weather radar, according to the NWS. Several were confirmed to have touched down Wednesday.
At least 3.4 million customers are still without power across Florida, DeSantis said. That was down from about 4 million outages.
Home Depot said late Thursday morning that 88 of its stores and two distribution centers were closed in the area slammed by Milton. The Vinings-based home improvement giant said it plans to reopen all of the stores once local teams evaluating the situation believe it is safe.
The company said it has sent more than 800 trucks of product from distribution centers to the stores in impacted areas, which helped customers prepare, and its “Store Support Center” in Atlanta has put together 5,000 “cleanup kits” that will be distributed in the coming days.
At its peak strength, with 180-mph winds, Milton was the fifth-strongest storm in the Atlantic basin on record and the strongest late-season storm ever recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was this season’s second Category 5 cyclone.
There have been only five other years since 1950 in which there was more than one Category 5 hurricane, NOAA reported. Most recently, 2019 and 2017 saw two Category 5 storms each. There were two in 2007 and four in 2005. Decades before that, in 1961, two Category 5 storms developed.
— Staff writers Michael Kanell and Joe Kovac Jr. contributed to this article.
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