The Current - Hurricane Milton felt like ‘someone screaming, just outside’

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

Hurricane Milton tore through Florida overnight, ripping the roof off the Tampa Bay Rays’ home stadium and leaving millions without power and facing extensive flooding. The CBC's Katie Simpson brings us the latest from Orlando, where people are just stepping outside to assess the damage.

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On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Three million homes and businesses without power. More than two dozen reports of tornadoes and related damage. The roof torn off the stadium of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. Hurricane Milton has weakened to a Category 1 storm. The extent of the damage remains to be seen, and there is perhaps more to come.

The CBC's Katie Simpson is in Orlando, Florida this morning. Katie, good morning. Good morning. What is it like where you are? Oh, man, the way the winds howled overnight, it's not like anything I've ever heard before. It's like someone screaming just outside your hotel room, and you're just hoping that a palm tree, the palm trees that are just outside are going to be strong enough to withstand the wind gusts. Right now where we are, there are some trees down, but Orlando, for the most part, did not lose power.

The concern here, though, is flash flooding. Orlando did receive somewhere over 20 centimeters of rain in a really short period of time. And so there are some concerns that areas that are prone to flooding are going to be flooding right now. The daylight is just coming up and first responders are back out on the roads. Conditions were so dangerous overnight, even here in Orlando, which is inland, that first responders, police, and fire officials had to be pulled off the roads until the wind gusts died down because it was just too dangerous. We know that the belief yesterday in speaking with this was that the storm could make a direct hit on Tampa.

It didn't do that, which is good news for people in that city. But what do we know about the damage that the hurricane has caused thus far? Well, we know that we're going to get a better sense of it as soon as more people can actually venture out to see how bad the storm surge flooding was. There is intense flooding all along the Gulf Coast. It's just trying to get those first responders out there to get a better sense of the size and the scope of this thing. But we know already that there is widespread flooding, particularly in some of those Gulf Coast communities where this storm made a direct hit. There were huge winds that shredded buildings. We saw, as you mentioned, the baseball stadium for the Tampa Bay Rays. The roof, part of it just was torn right off. Parts of it sort of still attached and dangling as the wind gusts came in.

There are downed trees and power lines. And so this is going to be a major cleanup effort. torn right off, parts of it sort of still attached and dangling as the wind gusts came in. There are downed trees and power lines, and so this is going to be a major cleanup effort in the days and really weeks ahead. And I guess once the first responders are able to get back out on the road, we'll know whether there were any fatalities in the wake of the storm. Well, we already know there were some deaths, and it was even before the storm made landfall. Those tornadoes that you mentioned, they were deadly. Even in South Florida, there's at least one or we believe two deaths that have already been confirmed, but we are probably going to get a better scale, a better idea of if there were more injuries, if there are more deaths. When we find out those people who hunkered down and tried to ride it out

through those evacuation areas, whether they're okay and they made it. Florida officials were predicting that there are going to be deaths, particularly in those areas where people did not listen to the warnings. And now that, again, the sun is coming up, we'll get a better sense of if those people actually did make it. And remember, there's not a lot of power in those hard-hit areas. So communication in and out of those places, it's quite difficult. Is your sense, I mean, in being down there, that people did take those warnings to leave? Again, not everybody could leave, but the mayor of Tampa was saying you could die if you don't get out of town, if you can get out of town. Did people take those warnings seriously?

We certainly saw signs that they were. According to federal officials, some 70,000 people stayed overnight in federally shelters. And that doesn't account for people who left and went to go stay with family and friends elsewhere. So at least 70,000 people were in the shelter system. We're in Orlando and we sort of spent our day talking to people. Orlando wasn't in the evacuation zone, but people were preparing to go outside of Milton's path. But as you mentioned, not everyone can do that. Yesterday, we spoke with a man.

He lived in a trailer. It's a low-lying area that's prone to flooding. And he said, listen, my wife is bedridden. And he was running practice drills of how quickly it would take him to get her out of the bed, into a wheelchair, into a car, if they did have to make some sort of run for it. So those are the kinds of stories we're hearing from people as a lot of people here are really forced to rely on hope. I guess the blessing, such as it is, is that when this storm was churning away in the ocean, there were real concerns. I mean, meteorologists bursting into tears because of how powerful it was, that it lost a little bit of power as it came onto the land. Yeah, and the big hope is that the flooding and the wind damage is not going to be as bad as those forecasters had been expecting. But this is the

kind of storm that was described as a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event between the flooding, between the winds, and the sustained amount of rains. This is not necessarily over just yet. Even though Milton is weakening, he's still a hurricane at this point, at the moment that we're talking. But the concern is that there's more rain to come and we haven't seen the full extent of what could be additional flash flooding.

Katie, thank you very much for this. It'll be quite a scene when the sun does come up and you're able to get out and see the destruction. Appreciate this. Thanks. Katie Simpson is the CBC senior correspondent. She was in Orlando, Florida. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.