Hurricane Milton live updates: Several dead after storm hits Florida

Morgan Gisholt Minard
Reporting from Orlando

Danielle Theiss has lived on this east Orlando street her whole life – she’s used to these streets being flooded.

Her house, with a river right behind it, flooded so badly during a hurricane last year that her husband and two small children lived in a mobile home in her grandmother’s backyard across town.

“The last one was much worse,” she says as we look down the mangrove-lined stretch of her cul-de-sac.

You can see mailboxes almost sticking out of the water as Theiss describes what happened to her neighborhood.

“This house, I guarantee you, is probably under water—and this house probably has water in it, too,” she tells me.

“And right where you can see the green mailbox, it’s probably about six feet deep. You have to swim to get there.”

Most of her neighbors left before the storm and cannot return to their homes until the water recedes.

In 2023, the same street was covered in so much water by Hurricane Ian that her family required an evacuation from the water.

This is not an uncommon sight in hurricane-plagued Florida. “If people need to get out, we have boats. We’ll pick them up,” she laughs. “We’re used to it.”