SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Hurricane Milton has moved offshore, into the Atlantic. And now, people across central Florida are assessing the destruction. Milton's winds topped out at 120 miles an hour, and some places got up to 10 feet of storm surge. Deadly tornadoes touched down across a wide swath of the state. But amid all of that, the damage still was not quite as severe as officials had feared. Here's Governor Ron DeSantis today.
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RON DESANTIS: The storm was significant, but, thankfully, this was not the worst-case scenario. The storm did weaken before landfall.
DETROW: NPR Adrian Florido was out today as people took stock, and he joins us now from Sarasota, where Milton made landfall. Hey, Adrian.
ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: What do we know about Milton's toll?
FLORIDO: You know, it's going to take some time to really know how bad this thing was in terms of damage. Assessments are still underway. Rescue teams are also still out, looking for folks who might need help. The governor said today more than 300 people had been rescued. At least five people did die, and that number is expected to rise. More than 3 million homes and businesses lost power. And there were also many communities that were flooded by those rising sea levels - the storm surge that was one of the biggest concerns with Milton.
DETROW: What about damage to homes? You were driving around today. What did you see?
FLORIDO: There is a lot of damage across a very wide area, but its severity depends on where you are. You know, we drove into neighborhoods today of very sturdy homes that looked to come away pretty unscathed, others, where most of the damage came from trees falling onto houses, and then some neighborhoods where heavy winds just tore homes apart. And that is something I especially saw visiting a couple of mobile home parks today.
At one of them I met Ernesto Rey. He's a construction worker. He'd actually been renovating his home to withstand hurricanes. The part he'd already finished did fine. The part that was still under construction was blown away.
ERNESTO REY: (Speaking Spanish).
FLORIDO: He said everything that was blown away he's going to have to start over.
DETROW: What about the hundreds of thousands of people who evacuated? We covered that evacuation for days.
FLORIDO: Yeah.
DETROW: Are they now returning?
FLORIDO: They are. As soon as the sun rose this morning, we saw people rushing out of our hotel to get back and see how their homes held up. A lot of people who left the region are trickling back now, too. I met Julie Busler today. She was one of the first people back to her heavily damaged neighborhood in the city of Bradenton.
JULIE BUSLER: I kind of took my time 'cause I wasn't sure what I was going to see when I got to our house, you know? So when I did finally get there, I'm like, oh, my God, thank you. Oh, it's just standing. So it was an incredible feeling until you walk around and see some of the other ones, and then you're just saddened.
DETROW: So such a mix of emotions...
FLORIDO: Yeah.
DETROW: ...From people returning to their homes, but are there places at this point where people have not been able to get back to yet?
FLORIDO: Yeah, a lot of the barrier islands just off the coast - they were pummeled. I met Wanda Hatfield today as she was trying to cross the bridge to Anna Maria Island, where she lives, but police weren't letting people back. So she doesn't know yet if her house survived and is anxious to get back.
WANDA HATFIELD: What am I going to see? We're going to see a lot of debris. We're going to see some water - standing water. We're going see trees down. And I hope we see our house standing, but we'll just have to leave that up to the man upstairs.
FLORIDO: She's hoping she'll be able to get back onto the island in the next day or two. But until then, she's staying with friends.
DETROW: That is Adrian Florido in Sarasota, Florida. Thanks so much.
FLORIDO: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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