By Joseph Wilkinson
New York Daily News
TAMPA, Fla. — More than 100 seniors were rescued Thursday from an assisted living facility in Tampa after Hurricane Milton flooded the area.
Emergency personnel pulled 135 people from Great American Assisted Living at Tampa, the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post.
Videos showed water had inundated the facility and surrounding streets, with cars flooded and first responders traveling by raft and airboat.
“This is extraordinary to see this type of flooding, especially in this type of area,” Sheriff Chad Chronister said in the video. “The University of South Florida area is normally a dry area. To see this unprecedented flooding, I can only imagine how scary it was.”
Emergency personnel throughout the region worked overnight and into the morning to respond to calls for help after Milton made landfall around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday near Siesta Key in Sarasota County’.
At least 10 people were killed, and millions throughout the state remained without power on Thursday morning.
“We don’t have confirmed reports of other fatalities throughout the rest of the state, but we may as the day goes on,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said.
The governor compared the storm’s initial impact to Hurricane Ian in 2022 and Hurricane Irma in 2017. Ian killed 150 people in Florida, while Irma killed 84 people. Ahead of all three storms, millions of people evacuated from dangerous areas.
Milton also caused significant damage to the state’s infrastructure and ripped parts of the roof off Tropicana Field, home of the Tampa Bay Rays.
By Thursday afternoon, Milton was already off the coast into the Atlantic Ocean and had been downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone.
“On the forecast track, the center of Milton will continue to move away from the east coast of Florida and pass north of the northwestern Bahamas this afternoon,” National Hurricane Center forecasters wrote.
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