(Bloomberg) -- The tornado spawned by Hurricane Milton was bearing down on Leo Vollbracht.
He had been preparing to ride out the approaching storm with his family on Wednesday when he remembered: The electronic locks on his church wouldn’t work if the power went out. So Vollbracht, the pastor at Lakewood Park United Methodist Church in Fort Pierce, went out to latch the doors manually.
Seeing the storm and its whirl of debris, Vollbracht turned back. Later, he found the church’s roof had been ripped away, creating a gaping hole in the sweeping wooden ceiling above the sanctuary. Around a dozen trees had been torn up and strewn across the church’s parking lot.
“God is bigger than this,” he said. “We’ll rebuild.”
Authorities in Fort Pierce have reported six deaths so far from tornadoes that tore through the southeastern Florida city as Milton made its approach to the state’s Gulf Coast this week. Search and rescue crews were continuing to work in the hardest-hit areas, including the Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, a senior living community of mobile homes where ambulances were still on the scene 24 hours after the tornado outbreak.
St. Lucie County Sheriff Keith Pearson described the scene at the development, which remains closed to the public, as “complete devastation.”
Pearson said that ahead of Milton, his department was going through the usual protocols for hurricanes, distributing sandbags and helping residents shutter their windows.
“And then the first tornadoes come 10 hours before the storm is even expected to come here and it wipes us out,” he said. “This was a violent, vicious act of nature.”
A sheriff’s office facility was also damaged by an apparent tornado, wiping out a hurricane-proof iron structure for storage of vehicles and boats. Other signs of the storms’ potency, including destroyed gas stations and trucks, could be seen around Fort Pierce.
Tornadoes often develop as hurricanes move toward landfall. With Milton’s center still several hours from reaching the Florida Peninsula, forecasters issued more than 120 tornado warnings across the state on Wednesday, a single-day record. Most were to the south and east of where the hurricane eventually came ashore near Siesta Key.
Governor Ron DeSantis said at a press conference on Thursday that there were “probably more tornado watches on this storm than any that I can remember."
Advancements in radar and other technology have helped forecasters become much better able to identify potential tornadoes. And the ubiquity of mobile devices had made it easier than ever to quickly warn about the approach of dangerous events including tornadoes and flash floods.
Yet such acute, intense episodes are harder to precisely predict than a hurricane itself, and can occur far away from a hurricane’s center, or eye. Fort Pierce, located along the Atlantic Ocean in St. Lucie County, about 130 miles (210 kilometers) north of Miami, wasn’t under mandatory evacuation orders for Milton.
Still, St. Lucie County emergency services said they received 900 phone calls before Hurricane Milton had made landfall on the other side of the state. Residents described being frightened by the outburst of violent weather.
My husband was praying, we were crying and I truly thought we were going to die,” said Bonnie Farnsworth, a 60-year-old retiree in Fort Pierce. She huddled in the fetal position in her closet, a makeshift shelter she insulated with pillows, while a tornado roared overhead, shattering her home’s hurricane-proof windows.
“I've been through many hurricanes, but this was something else,” she said. “I have never been so scared in my life."
Karen Risley, Farnsworth’s neighbor, said a tornado whipped through her home, tearing off parts of her roof.
“I thought we were gone,” she said.
Evidence of the ferocious weather was visible all around the neighborhood. Some homes had punctured walls that revealed glimpses of the rooms within. Another home’s garage had collapsed, trapping a white Lexus underneath. Pool floaties, welcome mats, ceilings fans and mangled metal were dangling from trees and strewn in the streets.
The earliest stages of recovery had also begun. Three teenage boys made their way through the neighborhood with a flat bed in tow, scrounging for scrap metal. Roofers were making the rounds to offer their services.
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--With assistance from Magdalena Del Valle.
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