Extensive flood damage in Tampa area following Hurricane Milton

AccuWeather

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.

Transcript

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.

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