Six people were killed in a retirement community by tornadoes spawned by Hurricane Milton that tore through St. Lucie County, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, officials said on Thursday.
Local authorities said that all of the storm-related deaths in the county occurred in Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, a community of mobile homes north of Fort Pierce.
Kelli King-Wolfcale spent all of Thursday searching for her 84-year-old mother, who had not been heard from since a tornado destroyed homes in the community on Wednesday, including some on Montoya Way, where her mother lived. Ms. King-Wolfcale said it was terrifying to not know whether she had survived.
“No one knew anything like this was going to happen,” she said.
That evening, Ms. King-Wolfcale’s worst fear became a reality: Her mother, Sandra MacDonald, was one of the victims.
“She was the last one” to be identified among the dead, Ms. King-Wolfcale said in a phone interview.
Two more victims were identified as Alejandro Alonso, 66, and Mary Grace Viramontez, 70, by Mr. Alonso’s grandson, Victor Linero. The names and ages of the other victims were not yet publicly available, Erick Gill, a spokesman for St. Lucie County, said Thursday evening.
Earlier, Mr. Gill said that within the span of two hours on Wednesday afternoon, about 900 emergency calls had been placed across St. Lucie County. Before the arrival of Milton’s hurricane-force winds, emergency responders rushed to carry out search and rescue operations at the retirement community and relocated many of its residents, including some to a shelter, Mr. Gill said.
Spanish Lakes Country Club Village is a 330-acre community intended for residents 55 and older. There are pickleball and tennis courts, a library, pools, a dog park and two golf courses, one inside the community and the other nearby. Most of the residences are older mobile homes, with some dating back to the 1980s.
The tornadoes turned some of the mobile homes at Spanish Lakes Country Club Village into piles of wreckage, and Sheriff Keith Pearson of St. Lucie County said officers were limiting access to the site as they sifted through debris. One vehicle had been flipped upside down and pushed 100 yards by a tornado, he said.
“It literally leveled some of these trailers,” he said.
One of them belonged to Arlene Bennett, 87. At the time of the tornado, Ms. Bennett was safely hunkering down with her sister, Jean Melcher, nearby. “She lost everything. It all came down,” Ms. Melcher, 88, said of her sister, in a telephone interview. “She’s fine. She’s homeless, but she’s OK. We’re together.”
The sisters said they were impressed by the speed of the response by the authorities. “It was a horrible thing to go through,” Ms. Melcher said. “But the response was awesome.”
Scenes of destruction were everywhere in the surrounding area. Roads were invisible under pools of water. A boat lay on its side in a front yard.
Down the road from the mobile home community, Shane Ostrander stood on Thursday morning in the remnants of his and his wife’s house, looking at what was left of the living room. A tornado had ripped the roof and walls off almost entirely, leaving a mess of lumber and debris.
Mr. Ostrander and his wife installed a new metal roof last year to strengthen their house after they were dropped by their insurance provider. The roof now sat mangled in a tall tree down the block.
Mr. Ostrander’s wife had been sitting on the couch with their pointer dog on Wednesday afternoon when tornado warnings blared on their phones. They took cover in a bedroom closet, huddling for a few minutes as they heard what sounded like explosions outside.
“It was two ear-ringing blasts,” Mr. Ostrander said.
When Mr. Ostrander stepped out of the closet again, he saw the sky where the roof had been moments before. He and his wife took shelter with a neighbor across the street.
Everyday possessions were scattered around the house on Thursday morning: an oven mitt here, spilled dog food there, a bottle of honey on the floor of what used to be the kitchen.
What will the couple do next? “I have no clue,” Mr. Ostrander said. They did not yet even have a place to put the belongings they could salvage, except perhaps in a neighbor’s garage.
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