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By Jordan King
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The internet is littered with photos and videos of the chaos, flooding and destruction Hurricane Milton brought on Florida.
The Category 3 storm hit the coast on Wednesday, before it was downgraded to a Category 2 storm, wreaking havoc with winds of more than 100 miles per hour and a dangerous storm surge to densely populated areas along Florida's Gulf Coast, including Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, and Fort Myers.
Milton ended up making landfall in Siesta Key near Sarasota, about 70 miles south of Tampa, where it was initially forecast to come ashore.
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But the Tampa region was still badly affected, with St. Petersburg recording more than 16 inches of rain, according to The Associated Press.
Clips posted by Conlustro Research on X, formerly Twitter, show heavy rain pounding the city, with the power of the wind visible in how trees and street lamps are being blown back and forth.
Another photo, shared by engineer Matt Dursh, shows a crane collapsed into what he, and others on social media, identified as the Tampa Bay Times building.
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Storm-chaser Jeff Piotrowski posted the same scene but from on the ground, displaying the "catastrophic" damage.
NewsNation senior national correspondent Brian Entin shared video showing the water "sucked out of Tampa Bay by Milton."
Meanwhile, the roof Tropicana Field, the baseball stadium of the Tampa Bay Rays, in St. Petersburg, was ripped off, with images showing parts of it shredded and blowing in the wind.
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"OMG. We all had a collected gasp when we saw this from our reporter. The fabric on the roof of Tropicana Field is shredded," Jason Adams, a meteorologist at WFTS in Tampa, posted on X, alongside a video.
Deaths have been reported at the Spanish Lakes Country Club near Fort Pierce but the numbers are still unclear.
Tornadoes were hitting parts of Florida before Milton even made landfall, with around 125 homes, many of which were mobile homes for senior citizens, destroyed before the hurricane came ashore, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, Kevin Guthrie, said.
More than 3 million homes and businesses had lost power in Florida by late Wednesday, according to PowerOutages.us.
People have been warned about life-threatening storm surges, hurricane-force winds, especially in gusts, and heavy rainfall.
At least 15 counties in Florida are under mandatory evacuation orders, affecting a total of around 7.2 million people.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news conference in Tallahassee that 9,000 National Guard members from Florida and other states had been deployed, along with more than 50,000 utility workers and highway patrol cars set up to escort gasoline tankers to make sure there is gas available for people evacuating.
"Unfortunately, there will be fatalities. I don't think there's any way around that," he said.
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Milton reached Category 5 status twice while drawing energy from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico before it weakened.
"The intensity guidance and the relatively fast forward speed of Milton indicate that the system will maintain hurricane intensity while crossing Florida," the National Weather Service said.
Forecasters expect Milton to "gradually spin down over the Atlantic, dissipating after 96 hours."
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