A historic evacuation and some luck limited Hurricane Milton’s devastation

They returned from the Orlando area Thursday to find one of their boats missing, but their house still standing. And if they face a decision to evacuate again?

“We’ll probably leave every time,” Kim Tynan said.

In a state where so many scoff at hurricane threats, a combination of dire forecasts, widespread warnings and fresh memories of hurricane destruction prompted one of the largest evacuation efforts in recent decades ahead of Milton. And when the storm finally arrived, residents and authorities said the state’s preparations largely met the challenge.

There was also some meteorological luck. Coupled with a last-minute track shift ensuring Milton skirted the populous Tampa Bay region, the mass exodus helped limit a catastrophic scenario on par with Helene’s recent assault on North Carolina or with historic storms like Andrew or Katrina.

Experts credited state officials, weather forecasters and local leaders across Florida with learning from past disasters to improve how they communicated the storm’s risks and uncertainties and gave residents clear instructions about what to do. Many, it seemed, listened.

“With each storm system, we try to learn from the previous one. We try to put something in place so that never happens again,” said Elizabeth Dunn, an instructor at the University of South Florida focused on disaster management and humanitarian relief. With Milton, she said, “this response was well orchestrated.”

Some began fleeing the coast even before evacuation orders were issued. So many sought information on the National Hurricane Center website that it was briefly knocked offline. Warnings highlighted deadly storm surge risks. More shelters said evacuees could bring their pets. Uber offered free evacuation rides.

Still, even the best preparations can fail to match the devastation of extreme weather. Milton and its aftermath have cost at least 17 lives and probably billions of dollars in property loss and damage. The storm’s shift away from the Tampa region meant Sarasota instead took on the highest storm surge. A spate of powerful and deadly tornadoes carved damage all across southern Florida.

But experts said it was clear Milton’s impact could have been much worse with a slightly different track and less preparation by residents, governments and relief agencies. Fresh trauma from Helene encouraged people to take Milton seriously, they said, along with memories of the power of Hurricane Ian, which devastated the Fort Myers area in 2022.

Col. Brandon Bowman of the Army Corps of Engineers had feared storm damage would block off access to fuel imports or knock drinking water or wastewater treatment systems offline. But as Milton approached shore, weakening slightly and shifting to the south, “we really started getting a sense that we dodged a bullet,” he said.

“It could have been significantly worse than what it was.”

In his first briefing the morning after the storm’s landfall late Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) described an all-night effort by first responders to help those who needed it. Bridge inspection teams were deployed to ensure it was safe for areas to reopen so residents could return. The response would take time, he said, but the devastation was less than many feared.

“What we can say is the storm was significant,” DeSantis said, “but, thankfully, this was not the worst-case scenario.”

People have also become more knowledgeable and resilient. On social media, they shared photos of themselves buying generators for the first time or wrapping their cars in large sheets of cellophane-like material. One photo that went viral showed how a family strapped down their entire home with thick yellow belts attached to metal anchors dug into their concrete driveway and lawn.

Data shows evacuations began even before some counties ordered residents to leave. An analysis by the research organization CrisisReady, using cellphone tracking information collected by Meta, showed the population in Florida’s most vulnerable evacuation zones plummeting as Milton approached, while it grew in areas even just slightly more inland.

In places such as St. Pete Beach and Treasure Island, the data suggests only about 1 in 10 people remained at home by the time Milton hit.

While most people headed to stay with friends or family or in hotels, shelters filled with many people who might have otherwise stayed home. At an elementary school in Sarasota on Wednesday, 63-year-old nurse Alison Royal said she left her third-story condominium nearby at her family’s urging — and just for her own piece of mind — as Milton stirred fear in her.

“I’ve been here 50 years, but this one feels different,” she said.

Despite concerns that the ongoing response to Helene in North Carolina would stretch efforts thin in Florida, relief organizations and local leaders reported no major issues getting what they needed. While Florida is used to tropical rain and wind, the scale of floods that hit western North Carolina and the difficult mountainous terrain meant similar preparations were unfathomable, if not impossible, there.

On Wednesday morning, some 12 hours before Milton would make landfall, 31,000 people were already housed in 149 shelters that were equipped with 1.2 million meals and 23,000 blankets, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency data. By the next morning, as the storm churned across the Florida Peninsula, shelter populations had nearly tripled.

DeSantis on Thursday praised the Biden administration, including FEMA, for its post-storm efforts.

Well before Milton hit, fleets of ambulances, search and rescue boats and vehicles, lineman, and other response and recovery personnel poured into the state, staging around regions that experts predicted Milton would hit hard.

“An abundance of resources” flowed in, as did a massive deployment of volunteers, said Kevin LaFond of the United Cajun Navy, a nonprofit relief organization.

Ann Lee, CEO of CORE — which stands for Community Organized Relief Effort — also described the state as better prepared for this storm compared with previous ones. She credited Florida for a rare decision to have the National Guard manage all the points of distribution for resources. That call was made early, cutting out a lot of the organizational chaos that often happens in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, she said.

That “usually doesn’t happen,” said Lee, who has been deploying teams to disasters since 2017. “It didn’t during Ian.”

And then there was a sheer stroke of luck — for the Tampa region, at least — when forecasts of a track straight through the mouth of Tampa Bay did not come to pass.

Meteorologists warned that Hurricane Milton could be Tampa’s worst storm in more than a century. They predicted an ocean surge of at least 10 feet would engulf the low-lying, high-populated coast, causing billions of dollars in damage. You couldn’t survive if you didn’t evacuate, they said.

In reality, there was no surge. Instead, up to 5 feet of water was sucked away from Tampa Bay.

Had Milton veered just 30 miles or so to the north, a massive surge would have poured into Tampa, much like it did in Sarasota and areas to the south. But instead, while approaching Tampa Bay on Wednesday afternoon, Milton wobbled to the east. Winds off the land over Tampa Bay sucked water away from the coast, rather than funneling it inland.

The Tampa Bay region still caught the brunt of Milton’s punishing winds and torrential rain. Tampa received more rain in a single day — nearly a foot — than it had in any previous October. Winds gusted over 90 mph, ripping off the roof of Tropicana Field and toppling a crane into a building in downtown St. Petersburg.

But Milton’s most deadly impacts occurred more than 150 miles away, where tornadoes tore through communities along Florida’s Atlantic coast.

Meteorologists constantly worry about the cry-wolf effect — that if predictions of calamity don’t come to pass, they risk losing public trust. It turned out that Milton was the opposite of Ian, where an unexpected shift in the storm’s track caught people by surprise, contributing to 150 deaths in Florida. Hurricane forecasting science has not yet advanced to the point that the exact track can be pinned down to within about 30 miles, even within 12 hours of landfall.

But for residents like the Tynans in St. Pete Beach, there was a feeling of relief at seeing a roof on their house.

Chris Tynan said he knows one neighbor who rode out Milton at home, but said, “I don’t think they’d stay if they had to do it over again.”

Hennessey-Fiske reported from Osprey, Fla., and Sacks from Tampa. Bryan Pietsch, Niko Kommenda, Maxine Joselow, Jiselle Lee and María Luisa Paúl contributed to this report.