Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dismissed a reporter’s questions on Thursday about Wall Street analysts’ estimates that Hurricane Milton’s damage could exceed $50 billion.
Yaron Kinar, an equity analyst at Jeffries, suggested that the total damage from the hurricane could surpass $50 billion, potentially reaching $175 billion.
However, DeSantis emphasized that it is too soon to determine the financial impact accurately, noting that the storm surge did not match the levels of Hurricane Helene.
“How the hell would a Wall Street analyst be able to know? It’s been dark all day. You’re just gonna know what you’re gonna do? I mean, like, give me a break with some of this stuff,” DeSantis said.
“They’re doing damage assessments now, they always say this or that, or whatever. I mean, what I would say is what I said in the original talkers, we had certain worst-case scenarios in terms of going into Tampa Bay, a lot of places in Pinellas County, they had negative storm surge because it sucked the water out of the bay. So, in terms of all that, where you’d see the entire Tampa Bay area underwater, that did not happen,” said DeSantis.
The Florida governor suggested that the damage from the storm is unlikely to reach the scale of destruction caused by Hurricane Ian in 2022, which resulted in over $50 billion in losses.
Hurricane Helene, which made landfall in late September, may have caused up to $47 billion in property damage.
READ: Florida Gov. DeSantis Pushes Back On Climate Change Link To Hurricane Milton
“But in terms of just, right now, the morning after, if I think back to, like, Hurricane Ian, I don’t think that you’re looking at a similar amount of damage to Ian. And then, with Helene, there may end up being more overall damage. There may not, I don’t know. But definitely, the surge did not reach Helene levels … So we’ll see, there will be a lot more that will need to be done to assess the extent of the damage, but what I can say is we have a lot of resources in play here in Florida to be able to mitigate and get people back on their feet and get that state moving again,” DeSantis continued.
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