In Sarasota, trees tumbled into roofs and roadways, many traffic lights are dark, and power outages are widespread the morning after Hurricane Milton tore through here as a powerful, Category 3 storm.
But no deaths were reported as of 1 pm Thursday, and fire officials said just one person had to be rescued from a barrier island.
Rescue teams are breathing a sigh of relief on Thursday because the massive floods forecasters warned of never materialized.
"We came out very lucky," said Tim Dorsey, Sarasota County Fire Department Assistant Chief of Special Operations. "It wasn't the catastrophic storm that everybody was prepared for," he said.
The damage amounted to "some coastal flooding, some barrier island flooding, and a couple damaged structures," Dorsey added.
That's because Milton broke apart as it made landfall in Sarasota, sparing much of the county, said emergency management chief Sandra Tapfumaneyi.
"The bottom of the storm eroded as it was coming towards shore. So that saved us from having all the storm surge pushed up," she said
Storm surge was forecast to be as high as 15 feet, but Tapfumaneyi says it turned out to be 7 to 8 feet, mostly in the southern part of Sarasota County.
"It sounds like even in North Port and in Venice, where we were really concerned, down south that was where that area of greatest concern was for the storm surge. It looks like they are reporting that they don't have too much flooding going on down there," Tapfumaneyi said.
Little Ringling Bridge is out, on the way to Bird Key, but other bridges survived the storm. Dorsey said fire teams planned for them all to be gone.
Milton's high winds blew signs over and split massive trees in two across Sarasota County. Some homeowners' roofs were impaled with large branches.
Sarasota International Airport sustained major damage from the hurricane, according to CEO Rick Piccolo.
The airport lost the roof over two sections of the main concourse, and a number of private hangars were severely damaged, leaving debris to clean up, he said.
The airport is aiming to reopen on Saturday.
But on the barrier islands, Dorsey said even with the debris that remained on roadways from Hurricane Helene just two weeks ago, there wasn't a great deal more damage from Milton.
"We had a tremendous amount of sand that came on from the barrier island beaches that covered the roadways (in Helene). Crews came in. They cleared that off. Milton came in. Everything's covered up again," Dorsey said.
