Hurricane Milton latest: Biden visits hard-hit communities in Florida as power outages continue in Tampa

House Speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that hurricane aid “can wait” until Congress is back in session after the November election.

Several lawmakers – including Republicans – have called for lawmakers to be brought back to session early in order to pass legislation to provide additional funding to those impacted by Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Johnson has refused.

The Republican appeared on CBS News’s Face The Nation on Sunday where he was asked why he thinks it can wait.

“Well, it can wait because, remember, the day before Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and then went up through the states and wound up in Senator Tillis’ state of North Carolina, Congress appropriated 20 billion additional dollars to FEMA so that they would have the necessary resources to address immediate needs,” he said.

Four days after Milton smashed into Florida as a Category 3 hurricane, more than 900,000 homes are still in the dark.

As of around 11am ET Sunday morning, 944,000 customers were without power in the Sunshine State, according to Poweroutage.us.

In hard-hit Pinellas County, around half were still in the midst of a power outage (281,000 out of 567,000 customers).

President Joe Biden is visiting Florida today to tour areas impacted by Hurricane Milton.

The president will make a first stop in hard-hit Tampa, before taking an aerial tour of affected areas en route to St. Petersburg, Florida.

After, the White House said Biden will receive an operational briefing with federal, state, and local officials, in St. Pete Beach before meeting with first responders and local residents.

Biden will then deliver remarks where he is expected to announce more than $600m in funding for projects for electric grid resilience, to help the state be better equipped to deal with future storms.

Before Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida, astronauts board the International Space Station got a view of it from space.

Here’s a time lapse from NASA’s Matthew Dominick.

A Tennessee couple who relocated to Florida’s Siesta Key during the pandemic says since 2020 they’ve had to endure constant flooding since.

Lance and Nichol Fountaine told USA Today their home has flooded six times in 14 months, most recently with Hurricane Milton.

“I’m done,” Nichol said. “I love it, I’ll visit it but I don’t want to live it anymore.”

“We can’t keep throwing money into it and expecting different results,” she added, calling it the “definition of insanity.”

Hotels across Florida are reportedly near capacity, as repair crews and relief workers flood the state after Hurricane Milton.

“We’ve seen workers from Alabama, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and even the Orlando area,” one hotel general manager told the Pensacola News Journal. “They started coming in Tuesday night and we’re sold out of rooms until Oct. 19.”

Residents were permitted on Saturday to return to eastern Florida’s Manasota Key, a barrier island not far from where Hurricane Milton made landfall on Wednesday.

Here are some of the scenes that greeted them, courtesy of WINK News.

A Missouri-based nonprofit is sprining into action in Florida to distribute free barbecue meals in the city of St. Petersburg.

Operation BBQ Reflief handed out box after box of BBQ pork meals to the hard-hit city on Florida’s eastern coast.

Florida’s back-to-back hurricanes are a reminder of the kind of threat extreme weather poses to the U.S., one that likely only get worse due to the climate crisis.

At a recent rally in California, Donald Trump suggested disaster aid might be conditional on a state’s politics.

More than 1,000 people have been rescued in Florida as of Saturday in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, according to governor Ron DeSantis.

“Fortunately we never had the 15- to 20- feet storm surge, but still, rising waters, very dangerous, and these guys have sprung into action,” the governor said at a public briefing.