More than just clouds were swirling when a tropical disturbance that would become Hurricane Milton formed in the south-western Gulf of Mexico, beginning its inexorable march towards a midweek strike on Florida’s west coast.
As its winds picked up, so did familiar feelings of anxiety and dread across a state still reeling from the impact of another monster storm, Hurricane Helene, barely a week earlier. Ultimately, the densely populated cities of Tampa and St Petersburg were spared the apocalyptic scenario some had forecast. But places elsewhere along the Gulf coast saw unprecedented levels of destruction and devastation.
Between them, the two deadly cyclones have so far cost about 250 people their lives, thousands more their homes, and left millions of Florida residents and businesses without power, many of them possibly for weeks to come. The double blow left Florida reeling, and there will be no quick recovery.
“Just when you started getting a little bit of normalcy after Helene, when things started to maybe stabilize, you turned around and had to deal with this other menacing storm, Hurricane Milton,” Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis said on Friday at yet another of a furious succession of briefings he has conducted over the last two weeks in the most impacted areas.
“As I said, there’s damage. There’s a lot that’s going to need to be done. We did not get the worst-case scenario, but we did get hit, and we’re going to have to work to bounce back.”
DeSantis was talking about both the immediate response to the back-to-back disasters, and the longer-term recovery that Florida’s experience as the nation’s most vulnerable state to hurricanes has shown will be lengthy and costly.
Even as water rescues continue and flooding from Milton persists this weekend, early estimates are already in. Analysts at AccuWeather calculate a preliminary total of $160bn to $180bn in damage and economic losses for what they say is “one of the most damaging and impactful storms in Florida history”.
By comparison, the inflation-adjusted cost of the most expensive hurricane in US history, Katrina in 2005, was $320bn, the company said. Milton will be so expensive partly because of its extensive reach: an EF3 tornado, one of dozens spawned in the storm’s outer bands, destroyed more than 100 homes in the upmarket Avenir development in Palm Beach Gardens, about 170 miles east of where Milton made landfall on Siesta Key.
“A $225-$250bn loss from Helene and another $160-180bn from Hurricane Milton is close to almost half a trillion dollars. The GDP of the US is $26tn, so this combined loss is nearly 2% [of that],” Joel Myers, founder and executive president of AccuWeather, said in the estimate.
The losses, he said, will be mainly focused in the fourth quarter of this year, and the first quarter of 2025.
“That may wipe out all expected growth in the economy over that period,” he said.
There are more immediate concerns at state level, including how Helene and Milton might affect the smooth running of next month’s general election. County elections supervisors and their staffs have been assessing damage to buildings. DeSantis signed a number of executive orders after Hurricane Helene loosening voting rules to ensure as many people as possible could cast their ballot.
“I don’t know of any offices that have been affected so badly they’re not operational, I think the only thing they’re looking at right now is power, the actual buildings are OK,” said Travis Hart, president of the Florida Supervisors of Elections organization that represents supervisors in all 67 counties.
“We haven’t compiled everything yet, and some are out right now checking their polling places and polling sites. But I’m feeling really good that they’re going to be in pretty good shape.”
Hart said he expected DeSantis would approve consolidation of some polling sites in newly-affected areas, as he did following Helene. Other measures include a relaxation of strict training requirements for poll workers, and allowing residents, as well as first responders and utility workers working far from their homes, to change addresses for mail-in voting by phone.
“A lot of people are being displaced, maybe their homes are damaged, they can’t get back to them, and along the coast some of them have been swept away,” Hart said.
“They can just call us and say, ‘Hey, I’m at this address now if you’d please send my vote-by-mail ballot here’, they don’t have to go print out a form and mail it to us, bring it in or email it.”
Hart said the state’s long history of disruptive hurricanes had taught election officers to be prepared, although he conceded that major storms in quick succession might present a different set of challenges.
“That’s one good thing about Florida, we’ve been here before. We kind of operate on the unprecedented, we’re resilient, we will bounce back,” he said.
“But this one may present new problems. Hurricanes are like elections, every one is different. From early reports it’s not as bad as we were anticipating, but who knows, when the full assessments come back we may have to shift gears and go another direction.”
Another area where experts say the hurricanes could have significant long-term impact is Florida’s thriving real estate market. Previous storms have not slowed a steady stream of about 900 people a day moving into the sunshine state, but an enduring insurance crisis worsened by an inevitable new round of premium hikes following Helene and Milton might.
Analysts say it is too soon to predict how things will play out, but even if prices rise and demand softens, there will likely still be no shortage of people willing to come.
“I’m sure there are people in Florida thinking, ‘This is it, I’m moving’, and people that have been considering moving to Florida thinking, ‘No, I’m not going to go, there’s just too many hurricanes’,” said Ken Johnson, chair in real estate at the University of Mississippi’s school of business.
“But still, en masse, the in-migration is not going to turn around. All the past evidence suggests, after hurricanes, there’s economic growth in the area. There’s momentum for business capital to come in, and folks do still want to retire to Florida.”
Johnson, however, believes the latest disasters will put pressure on the Florida legislature to fix the broken insurance market. Several private insurance carriers have left Florida in recent years, and the number of policies held by Citizens, the state-backed insurer of last resort, has ballooned.
“When the needle gets moved it’s going to be from an event, or set of events like we’ve just had,” he said. “Two hurricanes in two weeks is the kind of thing that will perhaps finally trigger some real action. It’s something Florida’s going to need to do, and I think they are going to do it, I just don’t know when.”
