Gov. DeSantis says Florida construction, including mobile homes, held up well during Milton

Gov. Ron DeSantis says this week’s major hurricane didn’t wreck buildings as much as he feared, even as he surveyed the arguable epicenter of the storm’s destructive path.

DeSantis appeared in Sarasota near where Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday evening. He extolled the performance of mobile homes and newer construction in general as better than expected given the hurricane’s impacts.

“I mean, there’s damage behind me with some of these. Honestly, for the mobile home stuff, I thought there would be more roofs (destroyed). So some of these mobile homes, I mean, they’ve done a lot better in Florida over the years. We flew in over a number of the communities as well. There were definitely some roofs that were really bad, but then there were others that did really well,” DeSantis said.

Regarding “buildings that were built in the last 20 to 30 years,” DeSantis said “they did very well” and “look good.”

DeSantis said he is still assessing damage from the storm, and is “confident” the state will “bounce back.”

Structural critique is a feature of the Governor’s post-storm commentary, as those who were in Florida back in 2022 remember in the wake of Hurricane Ian, when he repeatedly condemned buildings constructed during the 1970s and ’80s as “not being built for the long haul.”

“Whatever happened in the ’70s and ’80s, I don’t know. Not the best building material. I don’t know what it was, but you definitely see that,” DeSantis said.

He contemporaneously commented that “sometimes the stuff built in like the ’40s and ’50s did better than the stuff built in the ’70s and ’80s” during Ian.

DeSantis’ reassurances about property holding up during the hurricane come after Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky announced that USAA was going to continue operating in the state.