President Biden was in Florida today as he delivered remarks on St. Pete Beach, a barrier island of the coast from St. Petersburg on the state’s gulf coast, which was ravaged by Hurricane Milton. The President had also visited parts of Florida and Georgia just over a week ago in the wake of hurricane Helene. St Pete Beach suffered considerable damage from the back-to-back storms.
The President announced $612 million in federal support for local communities, $94 million of which will be split between central Florida utility companies, Gainesville Regional Utilities and Florida Power and Light. Biden also highlighted the availability of support from the federal government to Floridians directly, in the form of immediate financial aid, as well as no-interest-payment loans and mortgage relief. The President also detailed what FEMA had been able to do so far, establishing 10 disaster relief centers with more to come, and the delivery of food, fuel, water, and satellite terminals to “restore communications in impacted areas.” He went on to emphasize the need to “harden the grid,” making electrical infrastructure more resilient to future storms, talking up investments made when he was Vice President as well as during his current term in the Oval Office.
Biden delivered his comments in front of a toppled storm-ravaged house, consoling those who had suffered losses from the storms, stating that “the impact was not as cataclysmic as predicted […] but for some individuals it was cataclysmic,” measured in lost homes, lives, family members, and personal belongings. He also spoke of the unexpected pain of losing smaller objects of deeper personal value, beyond the damage to a home, “that’s the part that hurts the most.”
The President also took the opportunity to offer a message of unity, as political gamesmanship and partisan rhetoric has not abated in the face of these disasters. In the wake of Helene, numerous right-wing figures, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and JD Vance, stated that FEMA was running out of money for those affected by the storm, and that separate funds used for processing migrants should be diverted – FEMA’s funds for disaster relief were not running out at that time. Republican Florida governor Ron Desantis apparently skipped meetings with the President during this period, both today and when he visited post-Helene. He talked up the White House’s coordination with local officials, stating that “it’s moments like this we come together to take care of each other, not as Democrats and Republicans but as Americans.”
President Biden is expected to travel to Germany next Friday to meet with Chancellor Olaf Scholtz, a trip which had been postponed due to Hurricane Milton.
