LIVE: DeSantis Holds News Conference on Hurricane Milton Response

Kind of the powerhouse companies, you did have the munis. Yeah, they brought in thousands of extra linemen, and the co-ops brought in 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 extra linemen. Pinellas missions, so we have provided or are in the process of providing eight light towers, two message boards, and two forklifts, thousands of bottles of water for Baptist Field Kitchen, 16 bypass pumps needed to pump wastewater at lift stations, damaged by the storm, and then thousands of liters of water delivered to Campbell Park Elementary to ensure water availability for the sheltered residents and staff. And then on the debris removal, we started this weekend with emergency debris operations. We demanded 24-7 landfill access, and we took all of our trucks that are involved for the Florida Department of Transportation. They're building roads. They're doing normal work that they're supposed to do. That was paused. All those resources were surged mostly to Pinellas, but also to the barrier islands of Manatee and Sarasota. And in about a 72-hour period, they were able, our state guys were able to do 2,200 truckloads of debris from Pinellas County barrier islands, and that's over 40,000 cubic yards of debris that was removed. And I don't think there's ever been that much debris removed in such a short period of time. So I want to thank those folks from those state agencies. We also had some of our road contractors who, because the storm was coming, they were probably going to have to stop road building anyways, and so we transitioned them to help with the debris. So it was really a team effort, but those guys did. We had shifts working round the clock, and you had in the wee hours of the morning, as Milton was expected to make landfall later that day, you still had this debris operation going. So that made a huge difference, and it definitely mitigated some of the damages. We also immediately started doing cut-and-toss operations as soon as it was safe. 12,000 miles of state roads have been cleared, and that's 96% complete. And in less than 12 hours, 158 bridge inspectors have conducted nearly 2,000 bridge inspections across the impacted areas. I-4, I-75, I-95, and Alligator Alley are cleared and open. Sunshine Skyway, Gandy, Howard Franklin, Courtney Campbell have been inspected, cleared, and are open. Commercial airports, Daytona, Lakeland, Melbourne, Orlando, Sanford, Palm Beach, Punta Gorda, Southwest Florida, Tampa International, and Vero Beach are all open. Sarasota-Bradenton is expected to reopen at 0600 tomorrow, and St. Pete Clearwater Airport is expected to resume today at 1600. We are helping them with pumps to send so that they're able to get up online later this afternoon. Port Tampa Bay and Seaport Manatee have reopened with some restrictions. Channel assessments are currently underway at both of them, and I know Kevin is working with the utilities and the port, particularly in Tampa, to get the power restored so that they can resume full operations. Port Canaveral and Jacksport are both open. Landslide are expected to open waterside later today. 19 school districts that were closed yesterday have reopened today. There are at least seven other school districts opening on Monday, and I bet you you will hear more districts announce reopenings for Monday, given, thankfully, I think most of them had either no or very minimal damage. For parents who want information on your school district, you can go to fldoe.org slash storminfo. That's the Florida Department of Education website, fldoe.org slash storminfo. Fatalities. Now, we had five fatalities with that tornado in St. Lucie, and that's a very tragic thing. I don't think that these are things. With the tornadoes, they come. It is very hard to prepare. You gotta just take cover and hope for the best, so we have had fatalities of that nature, but what we are also seeing is we're now in the period where you have fatalities that are preventable. We have had fatalities because of interaction with downed power lines and water. We are seeing hazards that are still there, so please exercise caution. Don't wade into floodwaters. Be careful how you're using ladders. Use generators properly. Make sure it's outside your home. Don't run that generator inside, so we are now in the situation where everything has been stabilized, and so you have to make the proper decisions and just know that there are still some hazards out there. We see debris. Probably not as much debris, quite frankly, as I anticipated 48 hours ago when you were looking at what the storm was doing, but you have a lot of debris. If you have debris interacting with power lines, don't mess with it. People will come and be able to get that handled, so please exercise caution. If you need assistance with things like helping with your house, we have all the organizations that are now descending on Florida again. They're all part of the Activate Hope mission through the Division of Emergency Management in Hope, Florida. We have a 24-hour hotline, 1-833-GET-HOPE, 1-833-GET-HOPE. If you have needs, chances are we're gonna have an organization, not even government, private organization that can go and help you, particularly when you're talking about maybe damage to your home or property. We've got folks that can come and help mitigate that for you, so please utilize the Hope, Florida line for that. If people need temporary shelter, we still have Visit Florida's Emergency Accommodation Modules, Annexpedia, and Priceline available. We also have, through Hope, Florida, if you have shelter needs, you can call Hope, Florida, and they can work with their partners to see what's available. We will have the Hope, Florida bus located at the following places today. In Sarasota at New College of Florida from 12 to 5 p.m. In Lee County, Hope bus will be at Summit Church, 19-601 Ben Hill Griffin Parkway in Fort Myers from 12 to 5. Charlotte County, Murdoch Baptist Church in Port Charlotte, 12 to 5. You will have the Hope bus, and that will likely be in other counties in the ensuing days. If you have business damage, you can report your business damage on our business survey at floridadasaster.biz, floridadasaster.biz. We've also activated additional money for no-interest loans for businesses who may need a cash infusion. So we have an additional $50 million on top of what we did for Hurricane Helene. Normal businesses are eligible for up to $50,000, up to $100,000 for agriculture and aquaculture, and up to $150,000 for citrus and for cattle. And again, these are zero-interest loans, very flexible repayment options. You know, say we put aside money in Florida, we got a massive rainy day fund, massive surplus, and so we understand there's contingencies. So we want to work with people. We're not going to be beating down your door tomorrow to say, pay us back the money. We'll get it eventually, but we understand these are difficult times. And we are already starting having applications come in for Milton. We had a lot come in for Helene as well. So if you want to apply for one of those emergency bridge loans, you go to floridajobs.org slash EBL, floridajobs.org slash EBL. We've also activated the Florida Disaster Fund where people can make tax-deductible, charitable contributions so that this can be deployed to help people in need. That's floridadasterfund.org, floridadasterfund.org. We raised and distributed $63 million after Hurricane Ian. Now, this storm with Milton did not do, thankfully, the level of damage that Ian did, but there are going to be a lot of needs. We've had a lot of major companies step up and make significant contributions. And I know we've had a lot of individuals make smaller contributions as they can afford. And we thank you for that. And 100% of that money goes to helping people that are in need. I want to thank everybody for their hard work. This has been now going on for weeks where we've been on this emergency footing. I know people have been working around the clock. Just when you started getting a little bit of normalcy after Helene, when things started to maybe stabilize, you turned around and had to deal with this other menacing storm, Hurricane Milton. And as I said, there's damage. There's a lot that's going to need to be done. We did not get the worst-case scenario, but we did get hit, and we're going to have to work to bounce back. Okay, Kevin Guthrie. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Governor Santos, for your continued leadership. I know you're ready to get moving on the cleanup of Milton, and we're ready to do that for you. Post-disaster fatalities are preventable. You've heard the governor talk about fatalities. I want to take a minute and just remind everybody to the point of some of the governor's talkers, we will have volunteer organizations ready to go. We already have them ready to go to come in and help you. 1-833-GET-HOPE. You can apply. We will match up the correct, you heard me talk about a couple of days ago, the right resources at the right place at the right time. We want to make sure that we don't send you a volunteer organization that does mass feeding when you need something that needs to be cut off your roof. So we'll get you through GET-HOPE, ACTIVATE-HOPE, and make sure we get the right one there for you. We are also working with Crisis Cleanup as an extension of ACTIVATE-HOPE to make sure that we're ready to do debris removal, tree removal, mucking and gutting, and mold remediation. We have all of those capabilities now, and we need you to go, again, to the ACTIVATE-HOPE website, HOPE Florida, or call us at 1-833-GET-HOPE. Before you begin any cleanup, take close-up and far-away photos of what's going on. We need you to do that inside and outside of your home. Some roadways are still flooded. I know over in the Hillsborough County area, Plant City area, we do have some roads that are still flooded. Please make sure you do not drive through flooded areas. Accidents due to floodwaters are 100% preventable, just like the fatalities related to cleaning up your home are 100% preventable. Six inches of moving water can knock a person over. One foot of moving water can move your vehicle, so please do not do that, not to mention there could be power lines down inside of that water and also wrapped up in trees, so please, please do not go out in flooded waters. Do not cut things out of trees that have power lines in them. If you have lost power and want to use a generator as a backup, please use it safely. I'm gonna go over the three steps of using a generator safely. Again, make sure it's 20 feet away from any open door of your residence, whether that's your garage. Don't put it inside your garage. It's 20 feet away from the garage door, 20 feet away from a front door, back door, 20 feet away from a window. If you run out of fuel and you need to refuel, give the generator 20 minutes to cool down and then refuel it before you restart it, and then always have a carbon monoxide detector inside your home to help prevent the carbon monoxide poisoning. Don't disaster sightsee. We have a lot of people that are out here doing great work, well over 50,000, probably closer to 60, 65,000 responders, electrical workers, all doing really, really good work right now, but we need you to stay out of our way, just simply put. We don't need you out there sightseeing. We saw it yesterday in Siesta Key, people driving around, videoing and all that. Stay out of the way. We really, really need your cooperation on this. For assistance after the storm, call the State Assistance Information Line at 1-800-342-3557. Again, that's 1-800-342-3557. We have translators in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole waiting for you. As always, our best way to get updates on the web is at floridadisaster.org slash updates for all the information of the organizations helping us out. And then for the most up-to-date, to-the-minute updates is follow us at F-L-S-E-R-T on X and Instagram and on Facebook at FDEM. Again, Melissa, thank you for your partnership and your cooperation in this. General Haas, same thing. Governor, as always, thank you for your leadership. Okay. Good morning, and thank you, Governor, for your leadership, your support, and your decisive actions enabling a broad and capable response effort. I'd also like to thank Director Guthrie and his team as well as our fellow response teammates for their tireless efforts in safeguarding our citizens and state. The Florida National Guard currently has 9,000 guards have been activated with 6,504 deployed, as the governor mentioned. Our available force represents the largest National Guard response in Florida. Tremendous response effort. We're currently conducting ongoing response efforts consisting of search and rescue, ground and air reconnaissance, humanitarian assistance, route clearance, and high-wheel vehicle support. And we're beginning the phase transition to response efforts, as the governor mentioned, in coordination with our state and local partners. Our available equipment includes 31 rotary-wing aircraft, over 440 tactical vehicles, including 140 high-wheel vehicles, and five hard-bottomed boats. We're currently supporting 23 counties with 192 active missions, including point-of-distribution sites with 30 active pod missions. We're grateful for the support of our mobilized state-to-state National Guard partners, which included over 3,500 partners, 19 aircraft in 20 states. As the governor mentioned, we're transitioning to recovery operations, and we'll begin a responsible right-sizing of the force, which will mean redeploying those soldiers back to their states, and the recovery operation being largely a Florida Guard response. Governor, the National Guard is fully mobilized and stands ready to support the citizens in the state of Florida. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Melissa Sasha, state president for Duke Energy Florida. I first want to start by thanking Governor DeSantis for his unwavering support of our employees, and also to Director Guthrie for his support as well. I want to give an update on three primary areas. One, where we stand as far as outages across the state of Florida and here in Pinellas County, talk about our restoration, and really need to reinforce the safety messages that the governor just shared with all of you. So, first, from an outage perspective, Duke Energy Florida serves 35 counties across the state of Florida. We have approximately 850,000 customers off at this time. As of 11 a.m. this morning, we have already restored about 350,000 of those. From a resource perspective, we brought 16,000 workers into the state of Florida, both pre-storm and over the course of yesterday, and we have additional people arriving today. They are staged around the state, from Bexley Properties in Land O'Lakes, the villages, the Brooksville, Tampa Bay Regional Airport, Mannheim, Orlando, and Winter Garden, Ritchie Brother Auctioneers at I-4 and US-27, the Sebring Raceway, Seminole Town Center, as well. So, here in Pinellas County, where we all stand, we currently have about 400,000 customers off. Pinellas County is our most populated county that we serve. We have restored about 50,000 customers. Yesterday was a day of damage assessment and the beginning to restore critical customers, hospitals, water treatment plants, shelters, 911 centers. Today, we started full board, 1,000% moving very quickly into restoration. So, we will begin to see these numbers quickly decrease, the outage numbers. An important milestone for today on the outage front, we will provide later today a global estimated time of restoration for our customers. We realize that you all need information on when we expect power to be restored, but I am here to tell you, this is not weeks, this is days. So, please keep informed by visiting duke-energy.com. If you're signed up for our outage alerts, we'll provide you text message updates as well, but our forces are here. And I wanna also talk about the staging areas that we have in Pinellas County. We have them at St. Pete Clearwater Airport. We will have parking of bucket trucks at Countryside Mall. We will also have parking at Raymond James. And of course, we also have them, you will see them at our very iconic Tropicana Field that has a bit of a different look these days, but we will have about 800 resources there by the end of today. So, we are 100% committed to getting our customers' lives back to order. We know that the first step is power restoration. We take that job seriously and we will continue to do that. But again, this will not be weeks of interruptions to our customers. This will be days. Please look for that estimated time of restoration today. But please, I know people want to get back home, feel like they have some kind of control, clean up their yards. Always, always assume a downed line is energized. It is not Hollywood. It does not always have to arc. It does not have to sizzle. It can be a silent killer that is caught up in debris, trees, bushes, flooded waters, flooded areas, as the governor said. We have seen this too many times where customers inadvertently make contact and it comes to a very tragic end. Please stay safe. It is still a dangerous situation out there. We will be here to restore your power. And of course, we will continue to work with the state of Florida. And all of the officials behind them, I want to thank them as well, from the state to our local officials. They have been great partners in this effort. Thank you. And are you, is it your assessment so far that most, that there's not necessarily a need for a complete rebuild that's mostly just reconnects? Yes, sir. So when you're doing, I mean, so they have all the, we have all the people in here, statewide, Duke, TECO, FPL, co-ops, munis. And so that makes it go quicker. But if you have to rebuild the entire infrastructure because it got wiped out so bad, that just takes, even if you have everybody there, it just takes longer. If it's more of just re-energizing, you can see it done more rapidly. So I appreciate, this is more linemen were pre-staged for this storm than have ever been done in the history of any hurricane response. Because I think we're the only state that pre-stages, but certainly that, I mean, even Ian, we had over 40,000. That was a lot. We had over 30 for Helene, but this one was over 50,000 and probably got even in the mid fifties because you guys kept bringing people in when we stopped counting. So I really appreciate it. And I know it means a lot to people to be able to have the least amount of interruption to their lives as possible. And even though these storms do damage, most people, thankfully, don't suffer catastrophic damage from it. So if you get the power and everything working again, that we can kind of get more people on their feet quicker. So I want to thank everybody that's been involved for that. And I've seen some of these linemen from all over the continental United States that have come here to be able to help. And my sense is, with what I saw in Sarasota when I was down there, that you're looking likely with FPL, probably more just re-energizing, reconnect, rather than having a complete rebuild. That's just my assessment comparing Ian to comparing what I saw out on the coast of the barrier islands in Sarasota. So if that's the case, they've already done 1.6 million and the storm left yesterday afternoon. And so you got 2.4 million as of this morning. And I guarantee you, you're going to have people that are going to get this power throughout the course of the day. So thank you for doing that. Okay, we got a question. Yes, ma'am. Well, I mean, I think the question is, should there be more regulation or should there just be more common sense? I mean, do we have to regulate everything? I mean, I think most people take the cranes down, right? I know Kevin, isn't that the standard practice? I don't think we've had to mandate that. Yeah, and so you have building officials, you have other people that are there. And so, you know, it's like, you know, do you have to really kind of like crack down from the state to do it? I would hope not. And I think most of the time in Florida that is handled very appropriately, but I think it just takes a little bit of common sense. Well, you always, anytime you're doing stuff, you always have contingency plans for how you have to deal with different things. And I think, Kevin, do you want to speak to this issue? So, you know, the state of Florida, we certainly lead the way. And I think you've seen that over the last 72 hours on how we respond to disasters. But disasters are at the local level. At the end of the day, Pinellas County's got a plan, St. Pete's got a plan. We need construction workers to have a plan and you've got to have those contingencies. I mean, it's not like this snuck out from anywhere. I mean, we had strong seven to 10 days notice that things were heading in this direction. If you go back and look at the last, the previous seven days prior to landfall, it was constantly being called for, the greater Tampa Bay region. So, you know, again, to the governor's point, there's got to be a point where common sense comes into play. We cannot hold everybody's hand and do everything for them. That is not the function of government, whether it's the local county or the state government or even the federal government. It's not their job to do that. Again, I think there's common sense has got to prevail. You've got to have contingency plans. You live in the great state of Florida where you know you're going to be the peninsula in the middle of the tropics here. So, again, common sense has got to come in. But again, those have got to be decisions somewhat governed and overseen, if you will, at the local level by the local building official to say, hey, look, all permitted work has got to be secured. It's got to be done. We do that at the Department of Transportation under the governor's leadership. We don't leave barges out there to run into bridges. We got to have some common sense to this. And I don't buy this idea it takes weeks to mitigate. I don't accept that at all. I mean, just think about the stuff that they said. I mean, they say the debris takes six months to a year, and then we got 40,000 cubic yards of debris off the Pinellas beaches just by bringing all of our people, pausing road construction, which is also very important for Florida, coming over in this rapid 72-hour, and you got rid of over 3,000 truckloads of debris. So, you know, things can be done. You just have to, you know, have the wherewithal to want to do it. Yes. Kevin can do that. The only thing I will say is, like, Kevin had told me, you know, days before the storm, TROP can only handle 115. We're going to watch the track. If it's within a certain amount, we're going to redeploy, and that's exactly what they did. So that was planned for the whole time. So, again, as you saw, there was damage at Tropicana Field. There were cots there. I don't know whose cots they were. I can tell you we had 20,000 cots. All 20,000 of our cots went to all of those shelters that we opened. The governor came up again and supported us on doing what we call shelters of last resort. All 20,000 of those cots went to those shelters. So I don't know whose cots those were, but at the end of the day, all of those cots were still on the field. Those cots would still be used, whoever's they were. We didn't, no money was wasted. So, again, all of our resources, whether they were tangible resources or they were human resources, were taken out of Tropicana Field about 12 to 13 hours before Tropical Storm Force winds were sent here in the greater St. Pete area. And we took our resources. I know there's some stuff, they went all the way to Jacksonville. No, they didn't. Portions of that went to Jacksonville. Other portions went to the Perry Foley Airport, where we already had a Helene staging area set up. Other portions went to the Florida Horse Park, where we had another staging area set up. Some of it went to the Lee County Mosquito Control, where we already had stuff set up. So we did a full demobilization of all of the resources, whether they were tangible or human, and that the stuff that was there, don't know whose it was, but we got all of our stuff accounted for. About getting the mobile travel trailers. Yeah, so that program is active and that would apply for Helene or for Milton. My sense is that I would say 90% of the trailers that are gonna be needed are gonna be Helene. Just from what I've seen, just having toured yesterday and today. Well, I was in Siesta Key, which was pretty close to ground zero of where the storm did. And most of what I saw, there was damage, but I saw mostly the debris from Helene was there. And I talked to some guys who own some hotels out there and they said that Helene was much worse for them than this was. So my sense would be that there may be additional need for trailers as a result of this, but I still think the bulk of them are gonna be from Helene. So you can request a travel trailer through Hope, Florida. 1-833-GET-HOPE, 1-833-GET-HOPE. And you can talk about putting these trailers. Particularly, I think the trailers are good if you are going to rehab your property and you're gonna be the one kind of doing it or overseeing the contractors and you wanna be involved because then you're there. If people don't wanna do that, you can still reply for travel trailer, but we are now, are we approved for TSA for Helene only? Okay, so we are going to have temporary sheltering assistance available as well. And that's gonna be for both. And Kevin's working with the feds to do that. But what that'll allow you to do is be able to stay in a hotel for a, what do we have in now, six months, eight? The initial rollout is 60 days, but we can do that for now up to a month. Yeah, so you're guaranteed 60 days. We likely would be able to get that extended up to 12 months. And it's an issue with, there's gonna be a need to do repairs. I mean, you look at like Madeira Beach and these places in Pinellas, you have three, four feet of water. You gotta muck and gut that. Now you can repair that, but you also have a lot of people that are doing the same thing. So how many contractors are available? Are the supplies available? We're doing stuff with Home Depot and Lowe's and Ace Hardware to bulk purchase supplies so people can have the supplies to do it. But the reality is, is there's gonna, because it's such a populated area, it's a little bit different than maybe like Horseshoe Beach, which had a lot of damage, but it's just a more sparsely populated area. So that'd be a challenge. That's one of the reasons why, if we need to in January with this port stoppage, I know they tried to do it earlier. We will have our National Guard and I'll mobilize whatever state resources at our ports to make sure supplies keep coming in to the state of Florida. This stuff is not gonna be gonna, people aren't gonna be able to rehab their homes overnight. It's gonna take time and hopefully you can get it done as quickly as possible. But the idea that you can just pick up a phone and like there's a surplus of contractors that are available right now, I don't think that that's likely the case. Now, fortunately, Hope Florida, what Kevin's been able to do, bring these groups to the table. They are able like Team Rubicon. We had Rubicon out in, where were we at with Rubicon? Yeah, we had them out in Pasco. They will take these supplies and they will help you repair your homes. So take advantage of that. It's a great service. So people, their property, they have a right to do with what they wanna do with it. And it is tough when you have two back-to-back storms, no question. But I will tell you this, keep in mind also the people at North Florida, they got hit with Idalia in 2023, 13 and so they had damage. So they spent all this time rebuilding and then they get hit a year later and that wipes away. So that is really bad too. So yes, these are things are very tough. What I see is people have a lot of resilience. I know there's people who are interested in, and when we had Hurricane Ian, people were like, oh man, and that probably was the most significant storm that we've had. I mean, Michael was stronger, but Ian was so big. I think the total damage was probably more on that. And a lot of people were saying, oh, are people gonna wanna live in Southwest Florida? And like within two weeks, you had like people buying up homes. I mean, people wanted to get down there. So I think that there's always gonna be a demand to live in a beautiful part of the world. Maybe I took it for granted growing up around here, but you can go all across this country and not find beaches better than what you have right here in Pinellas County. The reality is, is people work their whole lives to be able and work hard to be able to live in environments that are really, really nice. And they have a right to make those decisions with their property as they see fit. It is not the role of government to forbid them or to force them to dispose or utilize their property in a way that they do not think is best for them. All right, love you too. All right, we'll be back guys. Thank you. We'll see ya.