Tornadoes in Florida were as disastrous as Hurricane Milton

LAKEWOOD PARK, FLORIDA, USA —

Faced with the approach of a tornado fueled by Hurricane Milton, Crystal Coleman ran with her 17-year-old daughter to hide in the bathroom of her hard-hit Lakewood Park home in St. Lucie County on Florida’s east coast. hit by the storm.

“That’s when the roof started to come off and I started to see the outside of the house,” he said Thursday near his badly damaged home, a few hours after the storm passed. “It was devastating. It felt like the tornado was spinning over my house.”

Her curtains hung outside the broken windows of her house, flapping in the breeze. Coleman, 37, said he had never been through anything like this before.

“I felt like I was in a movie,” he said. “I felt like I was about to die.”

Hurricane Milton, the fifth-strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, reached Florida’s west coast Wednesday night, but some of its worst damage occurred more than 100 miles away, on the other side of the state. on its eastern coast.

In St. Lucie County, a series of tornadoes killed five people, at least two of them in the Spanish Lakes senior communities, according to local authorities. Search and rescue teams are combing the worst affected areas, including a manufactured home park.

It’s common for tornadoes to form in the outer rainbands of an approaching hurricane, but these tornadoes are typically weaker and shorter-lived than the ones that heralded Milton’s arrival, said Corene Matyas, a geography professor at the University of Massachusetts. Florida.

There were 19 tornadoes confirmed in Florida when Milton touched down Wednesday. About 45 tornadoes were recorded throughout the day.

Calvin Lee Hamilton, 57, has lived in the St. Lucie County area his entire life. A tornado touched down nearby and tore through their neighborhood, downing trees and ripping off roofs.

“I was trying to prepare for the hurricane and the tornado hit me,” he said, leaning on the sawn branches of a neighbor’s downed tree. “The tornado came before the hurricane. It was a double disaster.”

The center of Hurricane Milton finally passed over the county Thursday morning before heading toward the Atlantic Ocean.

Across the county, concrete power poles snapped in half, trucks overturned in ditches and exhausted residents began clearing debris littering roads, using chainsaws to cut down large trees.

Neighbors huddled together, thinking about next steps and expressing their perplexity that this area was one of the hardest hit by a hurricane that hit the opposite coast.

The roof of Lakewood Park Church was partially blown off, and the bells in its steeple were crushed like aluminum cans.

While the adult parishioners held their faces in their hands and watched the destruction of the church, their children were nearby, playing and climbing the thick trunks of the fallen trees nearby.

“The main thing we need is to come together as people,” Hamilton said before resuming his efforts to clear debris from his neighbor’s yard. “I don’t even have my patio finished, but that’s how I love my neighbors.”

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