Florida residents on Friday returned to neighborhoods stricken by power outages and filled with piles of soggy, stinking debris as tens of thousands of emergency workers began repairing the destruction caused by Hurricane Milton.

The state’s leaders said Friday that initial assessments were that the damage inflicted by the storm, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on Wednesday night south of Sarasota, was not as catastrophic as experts had feared, in large part because a dreaded surge of seawater around Tampa Bay never materialized.

“We did not get the worst-case scenario — but we did get hit,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news briefing on Friday.

The storm cut an uneven path of damage across the state, submerging whole neighborhoods on the Gulf Coast while leaving others largely untouched and demolishing homes in unpredictable lines of tornadoes that tore through parts near the Atlantic Coast.

More than a dozen deaths were linked to the storm, with many of those occurring in places on the peninsula that had not expected to bear the brunt of the impact.

On the eastern side of the state, tornadoes spawned by Milton killed at least six people in St. Lucie County, including some at a mobile home retirement community, and damaged dozens of homes in Martin County, to the south of St. Lucie.