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AMY GOODMAN: More than 3 million people in Florida are without power after Hurricane Milton made landfall in Sarasota County Wednesday as a Category 3 storm with 120-mile-an-hour winds. The storm came just two weeks after Hurricane Helene battered Florida and other southeastern states, killing at least 230 people, making it one of the deadliest storms in the last decades.
Officials in Florida have just begun assessing the damage caused by Hurricane Milton, from wind damage to flash flooding. Multiple deaths were confirmed after tornadoes tore through a senior center in Fort Pierce. Overall, 116 tornado warnings were issued across Florida Wednesday. In St. Petersburg, the storm ripped off the roof of Tropicana Field, the home of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. A massive crane also collapsed in downtown St. Petersburg, where more than nine inches of rain fell in just three hours. CNN described it as a one-in-one-thousand-year rainstorm.
Earlier this morning, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor urged residents to stay inside.
MAYOR JANE CASTOR: What we are asking you now is, please, please, stay inside. Stay inside until we can get out there with our teams — they are all in action right now — we can get out there, assess the damage and make sure that it’s safe for you to go back out into your community or to reenter your neighborhood.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, joined by Juan González in Chicago. Hi, Juan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Hi, Amy. And welcome to all of our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we begin today’s show in St. Petersburg, where we’re joined on the phone by Florida state Representative Michele Rayner, who’s among the millions who lost power in the storm.
State Representative Rayner, welcome back to Democracy Now! I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances. I know you’ve moved from one place to another. St. Petersburg has experienced a one-in-one-thousand-year rainstorm. Can you describe, as the sun comes up, what you see and the devastation, and then link it to the kind of help that is being offered and what the governor is saying, of Florida, DeSantis?
REP. MICHELE RAYNER: Thank you so much, Amy. And it is — I’m glad to be back, definitely not under these circumstances. And can you y’all hear me OK, by the way?
AMY GOODMAN: We hear you perfectly. And I should explain —
REP. MICHELE RAYNER: OK, OK.
AMY GOODMAN: — to our listeners and viewers that usually we have you on screen, but because you’ve lost electricity, we just have you on the phone. Go ahead.
REP. MICHELE RAYNER: Correct, correct. So, yeah, we have no power. There’s no internet right now. There’s also no ability to use water. And so, the water has been shut down here. I evacuated my home, which is in evacuation zone B over by Lake and St. Petersburg. I came more inland into St. Petersburg, but I’m still here.
I walked out of my best friend’s home, and trees and limbs are down here. The reports I’ve been getting from county and city officials, you know, as you mentioned in the intro, the Tropicana Field top was blown off. Cranes have been knocked into other buildings. There has been flooding.
It has — I was born and raised in Pinellas County. I have lived here off and on my whole life. You know, I have never experienced a storm quite like this. It is disheartening. I don’t even know what my own home looks like right now, so I can’t even get there to see what that looks like.
You know, as far as the help that the governor is proposing, right now everything is up in the air. We don’t know. I’m concerned because, you know, he was already, ahead of the storm, playing political games, not taking phone calls from Vice President Kamala Harris, making his political members of his party spreading disinformation around FEMA. And this is not the time. This is not the time for these type of games. This is not the time for these type of shenanigans. It’s just not. We have people — we don’t know what the loss of life looks like right now. We have people that were devastated by Helene that now have the double trauma of Milton, who lost everything in Helene, who now probably have lost maybe even more. So, I am hopeful that all of us will work together and put aside these games, but it is — I also know who I’m dealing with. So, you know, I’m hopeful that we would be able to do that.
I mean, and the reason I say I know who I’m dealing with, last — two weeks ago, when Helene ripped into Florida, I had the idea for the state to lift the moratorium on — to lift the bans on short-term rental, because here in the state of Florida, you can only have short-term rental for about 14 days. And I had the idea for the state to lift that and say, you know, lift the bans on the short-term rentals. I knew that I couldn’t call the governor. I knew that if I tweeted it, I knew if I sent a letter about it, I knew he would immediately not even entertain it. So, I had to have other people serve as intermediaries and give him this idea, so he would think that it was his idea in order for him to do that. So I know who I’m dealing with.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Representative Rayner, I’m wondering — the evacuation of more than 5 million people, this was the largest in Florida history. How did that go? And what about these reports that there was price gouging at many gas stations?
REP. MICHELE RAYNER: Yeah. I mean, it was — I live near, you know, a major interstate that gets you out of Florida or gets you down south, and it was gridlocked. My best friend, whose house I’m staying at, her and her wife, they went to — they drove to Miami. Miami is maybe a three-and-a-half-hour drive; it took them six hours to get there. Right?
And we have seen price gouging not only of hotels, but Airbnbs, of gas. [inaudible] to contact Ashley Moody’s office, the attorney general of Florida, contact her office, report it, take pictures of it. [inaudible] This is not the time for people to be preying on folks’ vulnerability.
AMY GOODMAN: I also wanted to ask you about the rumors that are going around — I mean, I should say “the lies” — of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but it goes beyond her state, in Georgia, who says that the government is manipulating the weather, the denial of climate change, and also that FEMA will not be providing money, and how this can be a life-and-death situation. It’s not just misinformation, but if people believe this, how you’re dealing with this in Florida, state representative?
REP. MICHELE RAYNER: So, right now a lot of us are in —
AMY GOODMAN: We may have lost state Representative Michele Rayner. She was just speaking to us on the phone. Yes, go ahead. Your answer, state representative?
REP. MICHELE RAYNER: Can you hear me?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, we hear you now.
REP. MICHELE RAYNER: Yes. Hey. Sorry about that.
AMY GOODMAN: I know this is a tough situation.
REP. MICHELE RAYNER: So, yeah. Yeah, it is. So, I give kudos to our city and county partners and state officials. You know, we are releasing videos. We are releasing information on social media. We are making sure that our constituents know that that’s patently not true, that no one is coming to take your house, that if you applied for any FEMA funding, that that has nothing to do with taking your home or any of these things that have been falsely put out there. And so, it’s really just us providing that information to people. I know that we’re going to have teams of folks going door to door, letting people know about what is available to them in this time, not only on the city, county and state, but also federal level.
But once again, this is — these are people that spread these lies. It is just completely not the time. And it’s heartbreaking. I mean, people have already lost so much. They’ve already lost so much. Why would you do this in this time? Why would you do this in the time where people need help? These cost money. People — why would you do this? [inaudible]
AMY GOODMAN: You’re breaking up, state Representative Michele Rayner, but we thank you so much for being with us, and we’re going to check back with you, as the sun just comes up in Florida right now, Democratic Florida state representative.
We’re going to break. And when we come back, we’re going to go to another hard-hit Florida city, to Orlando, to talk with a student there engaged in climate change activism. His dorm is being used as a shelter as we speak. Stay with us.
