AccuWeather's Tony Laubach is in Tampa, Florida, where extensive flooding issues create obstacles for cleanup efforts as well as multiple downed trees in the area in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton.
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00:00Tony, we've been talking about the impacts left over from Milton, so give us an update here
00:04as far as the flooding, the wind damage, the storm surge. What has been the worst
00:09impacts from Milton that you have personally seen there in the Tampa area?
00:16Well, it's mainly been the wind obviously being on the north side of the storm. We didn't deal
00:20with the surge that we saw in areas further south. That is very good news for the folks in Tampa,
00:24but it doesn't mean we don't have water issues. In fact, you're seeing some of that leftover
00:27behind me. This is one of the shopping centers here in the eastern parts of Tampa, and you can
00:32see even the uprooted tree, which has fallen across the area here. So a lot of these types
00:36of scenes, even 20 hours after the fact, still got water in areas. They're still making areas
00:41a little bit on the impassable side, but we have been dealing with really the cleanup most of the
00:46day, and folks actually very, very grateful that we haven't seen worse. We'll show you some more
00:50video. This out of the Brandon area, this again on the east side of Tampa, and we see a lot of,
00:56I would say more nuisance type damage for folks here. Now that does include power outages. You
01:00talked about some of those, but we had trees down a lot of the areas. We had standing water on some
01:04of the area roads. Again, a lot of the shopping centers kind of ended up collecting a lot of the
01:08water, and we're still seeing that even now as these areas are slowly beginning to drain. The
01:13tree damage still pretty extensive across the region. A lot of that taking down some of the
01:17power lines, but again, as we said, many of the residents just grateful things weren't worse.
01:22I'm actually amazed. So we've been displaced because of Helene from Davis Island,
01:26where we're without power. So we were in an Airbnb about two miles from here,
01:31and we were a little nervous. Noises last night were crazy,
01:36but walking around and driving around, I'm shocked it's not that bad.
01:43And we are dealing with those power issues even still. In fact, if you look across the street,
01:48the power over there has been restored to the point where some of the fast food restaurants
01:52are opening. And I'm not kidding you folks, over on the other side of the hill, there are police
01:57officers directing traffic because the line to the fast food is extending out into traffic. So
02:02people getting out and about, we're starting to get the power restored. Hopefully that will be
02:05a quick process for many of the folks here in the Tampa area.