MIAMI — As Hurricane Milton barreled towards Florida’s Gulf Coast, Primitivo Cesario planned to ride it out with his family in their trailer home in Ruskin, on the eastern shore of Tampa Bay. But he heeded dire warnings from public officials and evacuated to a shelter several miles away, along with everyone else at Fairmont Mobile Estates, and he’s glad they did.

“We made a good decision,” Cesario said as he surveyed the wreckage of his community after Milton swept through. While his damaged home still had a roof, many others at Fairmont weren’t so lucky.

But everyone was alive, safe and unscathed.

Days after Hurricane Milton scythed its diagonal path across Florida, the terrible tallying of physical and property damage from Siesta Key clear across the peninsula to Cape Canaveral, widely assumed to be in the tens of billions of dollars, has only begun.

But one statistic has become quickly and surprisingly clear as hurricane-weary residents filter back to find what Milton left of their property and possessions: The low number of fatalities blamed on what was by every other measure a powerful and massively destructive Category 3 storm at landfall.

As of Saturday, the number of deaths attributed to Milton stood at 17, with several fatalities coming not directly from the hurricane, but from the dozens of tornadoes it spun off across the middle and Atlantic coast of the state on its approach.

The number and potency of the tornadoes was an unexpected and deadly factor in the storm, accounting for as many as a third of the lives lost to Milton. A tornado that struck a senior mobile home community near Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic coast and 150 miles from where Milton would later come ashore on Wednesday night, killed six people.

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that no deaths have so far been attributed to storm surge or flooding, which experts say usually account for around 80% of hurricane deaths.

For comparison, the state concluded that Hurricane Ian killed 149 people across Florida after it came ashore in 2022 at the Gulf Coast barrier island resort town of Fort Myers Beach, some 90 miles south of Milton’s landfall at Siesta Key off Sarasota. Most of those, an estimated 60%, died by drowning in the surge and flooding caused by Ian, according to data compiled by the state’s medical examiners commission.

One reason for the stark difference this time, experts say, is that public officials issued early, bluntly clear and consistent warnings about the potential perils even as Milton’s forecast path wavered — and people listened.

“Mother Nature is going to win that fight,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis advised those intending to stay in coastal areas where Milton could hit.

Get out, Tampa Mayor Jane Castor warned as the storm took aim at her city before veering south at the last minute, or “you are going to die.”

During Ian’s also zig-zag approach, some hesitant local officials delayed issuing evacuation orders until it was too late for many residents to leave.

At the same time, many southwest Florida residents who had not seen a major hurricane in years found it hard to grasp the vagaries of the predicted paths and intensity classifications in hurricane forecast maps.

The consequences proved fatal. Many in Fort Myers and Fort Myers Beach, thinking Ian would miss them, decided to stay home. Fourteen people died in the tiny beach town alone.

That has changed in the wake of Ian and, just last month, Hurricane Helene, which raked the Gulf Coast with widespread storm surge, flooding and extensive damage well before it finally came ashore near Perry, where the state’s shoreline bends west to the Panhandle.

Though Helene’s core never neared the shoreline, its potent winds drove substantial surges of gulf water onto land along with heavy rains, said Brian Haus, ocean sciences professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.

As a result, Milton’s fast development and approach and its rapid intensification prompted one of the largest evacuations in Florida. That evacuation is one success story amid the catastrophic damage from Milton, said Craig Fugate, the former director of emergency management for Florida and former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“If people aren’t there, they can’t get killed,” Fugate said. “Getting the population to leave the riskiest areas reduced the exposure. And that was a big factor. That’s why we evacuate.”

On Fort Myers Beach, Carlos Sanchez, who owns a pizza place and an adjacent ice cream parlor that he had to rebuild after Ian, decided it wasn’t worth the risk to stick around for Milton. So did virtually everyone else in Fort Myers Beach, leaving the place it a ghost town as the storm hit.

The damage from Milton wasn’t nearly as bad, Sanchez said — just four inches of water and some spoiled food. He plans to reopen, but, at 57, Sanchez said, he’s had it and plans to sell the business.

“We got real lucky” with Milton, he said.

Luck — and well-prepared first responders — did play a part in the storm’s low casualty county, experts say.

Had Milton in fact hit densely populated Tampa Bay squarely, a nightmare scenario hurricane experts have long feared, the toll on life and property would likely have been higher, even if most residents evacuated. That’s because the storm would have pushed a massive, destructive wall of water up the narrow bay into the cities of St. Petersburg and Tampa.

The worst possibility was for it to hit just north, around Clearwater, because the “dirty” or most powerful side of the storm, the lower right-hand quadrant, would have driven right up the middle of the bay.

“Had it gone just north of Tampa Bay, that’s a worst-case scenario,” said Haus.

Instead, it went a mere 25 miles south, a hair’s-breadth miss by forecast standards, and its northeast quadrant, with winds going clockwise, from land to sea, actually sucked water out of Tampa Bay.

And, as forecasters predicted, winds unfavorable to Milton weakened it to a still-formidable Cat 3 storm from its Cat 5 peak in the Gulf just before landfall. More significantly, Haus said, the winds sheared off Milton’s lower half, including the dirty quadrant, reducing its surge-driving force.

Even so, early indications are that storm surge from Milton was substantial and in line with predictions, Haus said. Just how high and how far the surge of water reached won’t be known for a while, he said.

What’s clear is that surge and flooding from heavy rains, estimated at 18 inches in some places, extended for miles inland, catching some residents unprepared.

As Milton cut across the state, more than 990 people were rescued from flooded homes and vehicles. Days after the storm had passed, rivers remained swollen and neighborhoods and streets were still under water from St. Augustine to Orlando and Tampa. Some residents said they weren’t expecting the amount of water and did not prepare, though forecasters had warned of torrential rains and potential inland flooding.

Along the coast, a preliminary analysis of storm surge from the National Hurricane Center put peak water levels at five to 10 feet above ground level between Siesta Key and Fort Myers Beach, including Charlotte Harbor.

“It was basically within the predicted range,” Haus said. “There was significant surge. It just wasn’t the catastrophic surge for Tampa Bay everyone feared.”

Other factors probably also played a role in blunting the impact of Milton’s storm surge. The storm made landfall as tides were going out, and barrier islands along the coast also serve to cut down the size of the surge.

But the fact that no one appears to have perished from surge is because people left, Haus said.

“The surge occurred along the more exposed coast where people did evacuate. There were clear warnings along the coast and people got it. I think, this time, those folks unfortunately have been really battered. They understood the risks.”

On the barrier islands, though, the impact was formidable. Already ransacked by Helene, the well-to-do populated sections of long, skinny Manasota Key, which runs south of Venice, took a second knockout blow from Milton.

Lee White and his wife, who evacuated the island along with virtually everyone else, jet skied back to check the damage on Thursday. They found their home intact, with a few bruises.

But it was a rare survivor at the edge of devastation, just north of where the road washed out and south of mounds of sand and a maze of fallen trees, wrecked cars and cracked concrete. Despite having no power, they were staying at the house with the windows open because “the weather was nice.”

“It’s better to go away and come back later because you’re not gonna stop it,” White said.

The couple had opted to ride out Helene at home and afterwards resolved to not do that again, calling the experience “heartbreaking” after seeing the water rise. Milton felt different, and not just because of gloomy forecasts and advisories from the government.

Even nature, he said, seemed to be warning them to go.

“We just had a feeling it was going to be bad,” said White, who has lived on the island for eight years. “Before we left, the birds were acting weird. Flying in circles, squawking. We’d never seen them do that before.”

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(Miami Herald staff writer Charles Rabin contributed to this story.)

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