Siesta Key, (APP – UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 12th Oct, 2024) The death toll from Hurricane Milton has risen to at least 16, officials in Florida said Friday, and millions were still without power as residents began the painful process of piecing their lives back together.
More than two million households and businesses were still without power, officials said, and some areas in the path that the monster storm blasted through the state remained flooded.
“There’s places where water is continuing to rise,” Governor Ron DeSantis warned on Friday. But while the storm was “significant,” he said, “thankfully this was not the worst-case scenario.”
In a White House briefing, US President Joe Biden said experts estimated the cost of storm damage at $50 billion.
The Federal response to the huge storm — and to Hurricane Helene, which devastated parts of the US southeast just two weeks earlier — has taken on an increasingly political edge, and Biden said he would visit Florida on Sunday.
Amid questions as to whether the federal response is adequately funded, the president called on Congress to “step up” its efforts, particularly to shore up hard-hit small businesses.
Former president Donald Trump has falsely claimed that the Biden-Harris administration has diverted hurricane response funds to care for migrants, drawing pushback even from some Republican officials.
Asked whether Trump was singularly to blame for a dangerous swirl of misinformation, Biden replied, “No… but he has the biggest mouth.”
– Hope amid desolation –
On Siesta Key, a beautiful barrier island near Sarasota where the storm made landfall, Milton left a desolate landscape.
Some streets were still flooded on Friday. Fallen trees and debris — sofas, beds, chairs and appliances, much of it left behind by Helene — were strewn haphazardly on roadsides.
“It’s just terrible,” John Maloney, 61, who owns a home remodeling company, said as he removed tree limbs from a seaside house he was working on. “But I think we’ll rebuild again.”
And 67-year-old resident Mark Horner sounded a note of optimism, telling AFP: “Our paradise will come back.”
Tornadoes, not floodwaters, were behind many of the storm’s deaths.
In Fort Pierce, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, four people died in a tornado spawned by Milton.
“They did find some people just outside dead, in a tree,” 70-year-old resident Susan Stepp told AFP. “I wish they would have evacuated.”
