Fisherman rides out Milton clinging to cooler in ocean
A man has been rescued nearly 50 kilometres out to sea after a desperate night clinging to a cooler as Hurricane Milton raged around him.
The US Coast Guard found the man using a cooler to stay afloat while wearing a life jacket off Longboat Key about 1.30pm (local time) on Thursday, before plucking him from the ocean.
The man, whose name has not been released, was the captain of a fishing vessel that had earlier run into difficulties about 30 kilometres off the Florida coast.
He went back to the vessel on Wednesday to bring it ashore, but later reported its rudder had become disabled as he tried to make his way back to port, as Milton closed in.
Communications with the fishing boat were lost and the man was not heard from again until early Thursday – after Milton had made landfall in the Tampa Bay area.
“This man survived in a nightmare scenario for even the most experienced mariner,” the Coast Guard’s St Petersburg command centre chief Lieutenant Commander Dana Grady said.
“To understand the severity of the hurricane conditions, we estimate he experienced approximately [120-145km/h] winds, [six-seven metre] seas, for an extended period of time to include overnight. He survived because of a life jacket, his emergency position-indicating locator beacon, and a cooler.”
He was winched to safety by the Coast Guard crew and taken to a local hospital.
The daring rescue came as authorities confirmed the deaths of at least 14 people as Hurricane Milton ploughed into the Atlantic Ocean after cutting its destructive path across Florida.
Milton hit Florida’s west coast on Wednesday as a category three hurricane, with top sustained winds of 205km/h. While still dangerous, it had weakened from a catastrophic category five system as it trekked over the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida.
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Nor did it trigger the catastrophic surge of seawater that had been feared.
Governor Ron DeSantis said Florida had avoided the “worst-case scenario”, though he cautioned the damage was still significant and flooding remained a concern.
The Tampa Bay area appeared to sidestep the storm surge on Thursday that had prompted the most dire warnings. However, barrier islands along the shore south of the city endured extensive flooding.
In St Lucie County on Florida’s east coast, a flurry of tornadoes killed five people, including at least two in the senior-living Spanish Lakes communities, county spokesperson Erick Gill said.
Susan Carlos, who lives in a St Lucie caravan park, said the storm was the scariest experience of her life.
“I’ve lived in Florida since 1989. Never, never have I experienced damage or the amount of tornadoes that came through this area,” she told CNN.
“It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever lived through.”
On Thursday, snapped concrete electric poles and overturned trucks in ditches offered evidence of the twisters’ power.
More than 3.2 million homes and businesses in Florida were without power on Thursday, according to PowerOutage.us.
Steven Cole Smith, 71, an automotive writer and editor who lives in Tampa about 10 kilometres from the Gulf Coast, rode out the storm with his wife. He said the wind shook the windows so hard he thought they would shatter.
“We really didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Smith said. He has a house in central Florida, but said the forecast for that area looked as bad as Tampa.
“I spent yesterday scavenging for supplies, fuel for the generator, everything we’d need,” he said.
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“I have a chainsaw too.”
Ken Wood, 58, a state ferryboat operator in Pinellas County, fled his Dunedin home on Florida’s Gulf Coast with his 16-year-old cat Andy, after making the “harrowing” mistake of riding out Hurricane Helene two weeks ago in his mobile home.
They heeded evacuation orders and headed north but got only as far as a hotel about an hour’s drive away when he decided the roads were no longer safe.
“It was pretty loud, but Andy slept through it all,” he told Reuters.
Wood was worried about his home but awaiting official word that roads were clear before returning. Helene destroyed about a third of his neighbourhood, and the streets were still piled with rubble that could have become wind-driven projectiles.
Florida was still in danger of river flooding after up to 460 millimetres of rain fell. Authorities were waiting for rivers to crest, but levels appeared to be at or below those after Hurricane Helene two weeks ago.
Most of the severe damage reported so far stemmed from the tornados, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency head Deanne Criswell.
“The evacuation orders saved lives,” she said, noting that more than 90,000 residents went to shelters.
In Fort Myers on the south-west coast, resident Connor Ferin surveyed the wreckage of his home, which had lost its roof and was full of debris and rainwater after a tornado hit.
“All this happened instantaneous, like these windows blew out,” he said.
“I grabbed the two dogs and ran under my bed and that was it. Probably one minute total.”
President Joe Biden said he believed the US Congress should return to address disaster relief funding needs after Milton. He said he had not spoken with House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The US House of Representatives and Senate are not scheduled to return to Washington until after the November 5 presidential election.
-with AAP
