US President Joe Biden said on Friday during a meeting on the response to Hurricane Milton that the storm's damages likely stretched to the region of $50 billion (roughly €45 billion).

This figure was in a similar range to insurers' first estimates after the hurricane crossed the state, inflicting severe damage but on a slightly smaller scale than feared as it approached. 

More than 2 million households and businesses were still without power on Friday, and some areas in the storm's path remained flooded.

"There's places where water is continuing to rise," Florida governor Ron DeSantis said. 

Local and federal rescue teams were starting cleanup operations in earnest on Friday, as were many residents in areas where this was already possible — clearing up debris, downed trees, or even sand blown onto houses nearer the beaches in the "Sunshine State."

In total, 16 people have died since Milton crossed the state from west to east, most of them in tornadoes that sprung up around the hurricane. State officials urged locals not to take unnecessary risks, for instance by going to survey the damage or flooding themselves. 

Biden plans Florida visit on Sunday as storms buffet campaign schedules

Biden told reporters at the White House that he would be visiting Florida on Sunday, as the storms have become a dominating feature of the US election campaign in recent weeks. 

The US president already canceled a planned trip to Germany for talks with various Ukraine supporters and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in order to stay behind to coordinate flood relief efforts. 

This follows sharp, and often unsubstantiated, criticism from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to the response from Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his election rival on November 5, following the more damaging Hurricane Helene in the southeast. Helene made landfall in Florida last month but went on to do damage in several other states, not least Georgia and the Carolinas.

Harris also participated virtually in the meeting at the White House, after a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona, seeking to reassure victims in Florida and other eastern states hit by Helene. 

"The bottom line is this: We are in this for the long haul," she said. 

Biden was asked about disinformation and attempts to use the hurricanes for campaign points of late.

He declined to blame Trump entirely, instead saying "he's just the biggest mouth" for disinformation, which he described as a "permanent state of being for some extreme people." However, Biden also said he believed the country as a whole would rather be told facts and witness bipartisan political cooperation in such emergency situations.

msh/lo (AFP, dpa, Reuters)