Deadly tornados rampaged Florida

FORT PIERCE, United States (AFP) — Hours before “Milton” made landfall on Florida’s west coast, many were caught by surprise when the hurricane’s outer bands spawned deadly tornadoes hundreds of miles away.

In the eastern city of Fort Pierce, parts of a retirement community looked as if struck by a bomb after two tornadoes wreaked chaotic havoc, killing at least five people.

“Do I feel lucky? Damn right I do,” said Ralph Burnett, whose house is located just a few dozens of meters from the decimated Spanish Lakes Country Club neighborhood.

Police have cordoned off all entrances to the community — but drone footage reveals several homes that have been completely obliterated and a substantial number that sustained major damage.

Burnett’s next-door neighbor, Susan Stepp, said it was “horrible, just horrible. I heard some pretty gruesome things” about the deaths.

She and her husband Bill had just returned days earlier from a trip to northern Michigan in their recreational vehicle, which now lies on its side in their front lawn.

“The tornado came through and picked up my 22-ton motor home and threw it across the yard,” said Bill, 72, expressing “absolute astonishment” at the tornado’s power.

While people were understandably focused on the core of the hurricane, meteorologists were also worried in the days prior that “Milton” could produce tornados in eastern Florida, tornado expert Jana Houser told Agence France-Presse.

The outer hurricane bands are “notoriously the location where tornadoes form,” said Houser, an associate professor at The Ohio State University.

Hurricane-produced tornadoes are less likely to form over water, but as the winds in a hurricane’s outer bands move over land, conditions become right for the formation of twisters.

While Houser was unable to link the specific tornados to climate change, she said Milton was “incredibly intense, very large” because of the increasingly warm temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, which give “more fuel to the hurricane to work with.”