'Double disaster' in Florida, where tornadoes heralded Milton's arrival

By Brad Brooks

LAKEWOOD PARK, Florida (Reuters) - As a tornado whipped up by Hurricane Milton approached, Crystal Coleman raced with her 17-year-old daughter to hide in the bathroom of her home in Lakewood Park in Florida's hard-hit St. Lucie County on the eastern coast.

"That is when the roof started pulling off, I started seeing outside of the house," she said standing near her badly damaged home on Thursday, a few hours after the storm had passed. "It was devastating. It felt like the tornado was spinning on top of my house."

Her curtains hung outside of her home's smashed-out windows, fluttering in the breeze. Coleman, 37, said that she had never been through anything like this before.

"It felt like I was in a movie," she said. "I felt like I was about to die."

Hurricane Milton, the fifth-most-intense Atlantic hurricane on record, came ashore on Florida's western coast on Wednesday evening, but some of its worst havoc was wrought more than 100 miles (km) away on the other side of the state along its eastern shore.

In St. Lucie County, an advance flurry of tornadoes killed five people, including at least two in the senior-living Spanish Lakes communities, according to local officials. Search-and-rescue teams here are combing through hard-hit areas, including a mobile-home park.

It is not unusual for tornadoes to form in the far outer rain bands of an approaching hurricane, but such tornadoes are typically weaker and shorter-lived than those that heralded Milton's arrival, according to Corene Matyas, a University of Florida geography professor.

There were 19 confirmed tornadoes in Florida by the time Milton made landfall on Wednesday. Some 45 tornadoes were reported throughout the day.

Calvin Lee Hamilton, 57, has lived in the St. Lucie County area for his entire life. A tornado touched down nearby and raced through his neighborhood, downing trees and ripping off roofs.

"I was trying to get prepared for the hurricane and a tornado hit," he said, resting against the sawn-up limbs of a neighbor's downed tree. "The tornado hit before the hurricane. It was a double disaster."

The center of Hurricane Milton eventually passed over the county on Thursday morning before heading out to the Atlantic Ocean.

Across the county, concrete electric poles were snapped in half, trucks were overturned in ditches, and frazzled residents were beginning to clean up the debris littering the roads, using chainsaws to chop up large trees.

Neighbors huddled, figuring out next steps and expressing bewilderment that this area was among the hardest hit by a hurricane that struck the opposite coast.

The roof of the Lakewood Park Church was partially blown off and the bells in its belfry crushed like an aluminum can.

As adult parishioners held their faces in their hands and stared at the destruction of the church, their children were nearby, playing and climbing thick trunks of trees downed nearby.

"The main thing we need is to come together as people," Hamilton said before resuming his efforts to clear debris from his neighbor's yard. "I ain't even got my yard finished, you know, but I love my neighbors like that."

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lakewood Park; additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago; writing by Jonathan Allen; editing by Paul Thomasch and Sandra Maler)