A region that is still recovering from Hurricane Idalia is now dealing with significant damage from a tornado early Thursday morning.
Preliminary reporting out of the National Weather Service shows an EF-2 tornado in Citrus County had maximum winds of 125 mph.
A powerful storm system that moved through Florida also spawned tornadoes that damaged buildings and mobile homes in Clearwater Beach and Dunedin.
The tornado in Citrus comes just over a month after 5,000 homes there suffered storm-surge damage from Hurricane Idalia.
Citrus County Sheriff Mike Prendergast said the tornado started in southwest Citrus and worked its way northeast toward Marion County.
He said got a text at 2:26 a.m. that a tornado had touched down in Crystal River, where most of the damage was concentrated.
Prendergast said a woman in her 60s was sheltering in her bathroom at the Ridge View apartment complex in Crystal River when the tornado struck.
"I'm looking at her apartment," Prendergast said in a Zoom interview. "She has no walls on the exterior of her apartment, she has no roof on her apartment, and her bathroom is littered with debris. And she crawled out from that after the tornado passed through here."
Prendergast said she didn't have any visible injuries but was taken to the hospital for evaluation.
"Psychologically, I don't know how I would feel if a tornado passed over my home and ripped apart my house and exposed the sky to me while I was trying to protect myself in my bathtub," Prendergast said.
Prendergast said "easily half" of the 48 apartments at the complex sustained damage and "are properties that you cannot go back into safely and occupy."
"It's because of the roofs being ripped off," Prendergast said. "Or in a couple of cases, the sidewalls ripped off.
"In one case, all three exterior walls of this apartment were ripped off, and they're nowhere to be found."
Prendergast said the American Red Cross would be on hand to assess damage, particularly to areas that were impacted by Hurricane Idalia.
"The businesses that were damaged, too, just came out of Hurricane Idalia," Prendergast said. "When you think about it, a little over a month ago, a lot of businesses had storm surge. We didn't have wind damage, but we had quite extensive storm surge.
"You have to recall, a little over a month ago, we had 5,000 homes on the west side of our county that were inundated with 7-plus feet of storm surge from Hurricane Idalia. So we're still reeling from that, trying to recover from that. As this happens, and then it brings this path of destruction with it, that has destroyed homes, destroyed businesses."
Schools in Citrus are closed Thursday, and multiple roads were also shut down due to downed power and transmission lines.
