Smoke still smoldering amid Hurricane Milton's wreckage a day after landfall

AccuWeather

Storm chaser Connor McCrorey reported live from Siesta Key, Florida, where nearly 24 hours after Milton's landfall, buildings that burned to the ground amid flooding were still smoking

Transcript

00:00Our coverage of Milton continues now with storm chaser Connor McCrory. He is

00:04live in Siesta Key and Connor well you found yourself here at the point of

00:08landfall. This was a fierce storm and a unique one because I know that things

00:13really escalated on the backside of the storm for many people. So what was your

00:17experience like with this one? I know we checked in with you throughout the

00:19course of the evening last night but what will you remember the most from

00:22this one? The front side came through and honestly it we got the sense that maybe

00:28the storm wasn't as strong as it had been anticipated to be. But then after

00:32we went through that calm eye and the backside came through it roared to life.

00:36We definitely I mean it's hard to visually estimate those winds sometimes

00:40but I'd say in downtown Sarasota we had gusts over 110 miles per hour at times

00:44and that's also when the surge really began to come up and move in. So the

00:49backside you never know if it's gonna be the front half of the backside that gets

00:52you with these hurricanes and this time it was definitely the back half. And Connor

00:56I see behind you it appears that there's a house that must have burnt

01:00down. Do you know of what what led to that? I have to assume that there was

01:05some flooding or some kind of damage tied to the storm that that led to some

01:08problems there. I've been told that it was during the flooding last night

01:13around midnight that this this condo building caught fire. If you look all the

01:18way back there apparently the fire originated in the clubhouse and then the

01:22winds swept it down this way and three more units caught fire and burned

01:27completely to the ground. You can actually see the smoke it's still

01:31smoldering here about 18 hours later. Different forms of damage here whether

01:37it be a structure fire caused by the storm, storm surge flooding, serious wind

01:41as well. Connor McCrory, storm chaser there at the point of landfall in

01:45Siesta Key, Florida. Connor we appreciate your reporting. Thanks again.

01:49And we take a look at, thanks Connor, by the numbers here again that was the

01:54point of landfall Siesta Key, Florida. He was right there and we had gusts of wind

01:59over a hundred miles per hour in a few spots. Now the storm surge there are

02:02different things that in the weather world are kind of tricky to document

02:07well. There will be crews that go out with NOAA and local National Weather

02:11Service offices especially the Tampa Bay office that's headquartered in Ruskin

02:16and they're going to do a pretty thorough investigation of what the storm

02:18surge actually was. The problem with some of the statistics sometimes is that the

02:23sensors that measure storm surge are very widely separated and sometimes you

02:28have 70, 80 miles of coastline or 40 or 50 miles without a true sensor to

02:33measure things and we learn after the fact that while the greatest gauge height

02:37estimate was 5.78 feet we often see that there are localized areas to see quite a

02:42bit more storm surge than that. So after talking to John Porter we really do

02:47expect that there will be areas somebody out there maybe near downtown

02:50Sarasota that saw a greater than 10-foot storm surge with this one.

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