After Hurricane Milton made landfall along Florida’s Gulf Coast Wednesday night, Sarasota was enveloped in an eerie moment of complete calm as the eyewall moved over the city. Milton made landfall as a Category 3 storm at 8:30 p.m. near Siesta Key, a barrier island next to Sarasota, with video shared to social media showing the moments after the rain and intense winds completely halted as the storm continued its path across the Sunshine State.
“It’s about 8:30 p.m., and I’m in downtown Sarasota in the eye of Hurricane Milton. And check how calm it is. It is dead calm,” hurricane chaser Josh Morgerman said in a clip shared to X (view it here). Just moments earlier, Morgerman said gusts were blasting through these city streets, just shrieking. There was debris flying. There were trees coming down… Signs bent to the ground. Power flashes. All this urban pandemonium.”
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According to reports, per CNN, when Milton made landfall, it brought with it with 120 mph sustained winds and heavy rains that lead to life-threatening flash flooding, flooded roads, and flying debris.
The eye of the storm, however, brought a moment of relief, with NBC News’ Tom Llamas reporting that it looked “like a calm night” as the eyewall passed over them. Llamas reported that there was “no rain. There’s no wind. It is a weather phenomenon that I’ve experienced before covering hurricanes, but when you think about the size and the force of Hurricane Milton, and you see there’s really nothing happening right now in the eye of the storm, it’s pretty incredible.”
Both Morgerman and Llamas warned, though, that the break in severe weather was short-lived, and once the eye of Milton passed, the worst of the storm would arrive. According to Llamas, “after the eye passes, on the backside of that storm are the strongest winds of this hurricane.”
In an update at 9:03 p.m., Morgerman reported that the wind was “suddenly picking up again. First just a rustle, now an impatient breeze” as Sarasota headed back into the eyewall. “Everything’s starting to move again. Everything’s starting to dance,” he said. In a later update, he said that the winds on Hurricane Milton’s backside “were more destructive than winds on the front side.”
As of early Thursday morning, Hurricane’s Milton eye had traveled from near the Tampa Bay area east toward Orlando and Cape Canaveral and was exiting the east coast, according to CNN meteorologist Derek Van Dam. The storm, once a powerful Category 5 hurricane before it weakened to a Category 3 storm before making landfall, weakened to a Category 1 as it moved across Florida. Several casualties have been reported, including in St. Lucie County, where a tornado tore through a mobile home retirement community, and more than 3 million Floridians have been left without power.
