Florida Gov DeSantis says crews have already restored power to 600k customer, in Milton aftermath

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday the emergency crews have this morning have already restored electricity to over 600,000 customer who lost power as Hurricane Milton swept through the state. 

However, he made clear that roughy 3.1 other customer are still without power.

He said that the counties that have the most significant storm outages are Hillsboro, Manatee, Pinellas and Sarasota. 

"A lot of what they'll do this morning is likely to assess the damage and then begin restoration operations very quickly," DeSantis said in an a press conference. "And we appreciate everybody that's in that fight because that's very important for a lot of people."

Milton started out as a Category 5 storm but has since been downgraded to a Category 1.

"What we can say is the storm was significant, but thankfully this was not the worst case scenario," DeSantis said. "The storm did weaken before landfall and the storm surge as initially reported has not been as significant overall as what was observed for Hurricane Helene. 

"Right now it looks like Sarasota County had the most significant storm surge, likely somewhere between eight to 10 feet," he added. "And remember, with Helene we had 15 to 20 feet in Taylor County."