Florida residents who evacuated as Hurricane Milton approached are being encouraged not to rush back to their homes following the storm, Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman told Newsmax on Thursday morning.
Milton made landfall Wednesday night in Siesta Key, which neighbors Sarasota on the state's west coast.
Hoffman told "Wake Up America" co-host Sharla McBride that residents in his area had been told to wait on returning to their homes.
"We messaged that before the storm: Do not come out and just be driving around looking at the damage and trying to get back into the barrier islands until the search and rescue teams get in there and go door to door, we make sure that there's no live wires, there's not flooding," Hoffman said. "We don't want folks returning to become rescues while we're trying to rescue the people that are still there.
"We've done a very good job of messaging that out of our emergency operations center here, and I'm hopeful that folks will heed that warning."
Hoffman said most area residents heeded warnings to evacuate.
"Frankly, I've lived here 40 years and been in law enforcement in this community for over 30. This storm, people did heed the warning," he said. "We had a record number of people on I-75. The streets were pretty much vacant on the barrier islands when our deputies were out there before we pulled them back before the storm.
"So, I'm optimistic that we're not going to have any fatalities. And hopefully, very few rescues."
McBride asked Hoffman about the challenges he and his team will immediately face as the community tries to recover from Milton.
"Well, first and foremost is getting to some of these areas, right?" he said. "We know that we're probably going to have trees down on the barrier islands, power lines down. So, we'll go in there with search-and-rescue crews when we have first light, and we'll start kind of going through that.
"Obviously, we had a significant amount of debris sitting out by the roadside here in Sarasota County because of [Hurricanes] Debby and Helene. So, that's going to fly around and cause us some, some issues as well.
"But I'm pretty optimistic that those folks, particularly on the barrier islands and even inland in our Zones A, B, and C, the majority of those folks did evacuate."
Flooding is a concern, though Hoffman said initial reports indicated things could have been worse.
"This storm was unique in that it had [tidal] surge. It had rain, it had wind. It had certainly tornadoes, particularly in the interior of Florida," he said. "So, once we go street by street, yes, we probably will find some flooding. And speaking to the chiefs of police of several of our municipalities in our county, they're seeing that as well.
"But they're saying 4 to 6 feet, which was significantly less than the 12 to 15 feet that they were predicting when the storm was still far out west in the Gulf."
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Charlie McCarthy ✉
Charlie McCarthy, a writer/editor at Newsmax, has nearly 40 years of experience covering news, sports, and politics.
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