Florida residents who fled hundreds of miles to escape Hurricane Milton made slow trips home on crowded highways, weary from their long journeys and the clean up work awaiting them but also grateful to be coming back alive.

“I love my house, but I’m not dying in it,” Fred Neuman said on Friday while walking his dog outside a rest stop off Interstate 75 north of Tampa.

Mr Neuman and his wife live in Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall on Wednesday night as a powerful, Category 3 hurricane.

Heeding local evacuation orders ahead of the storm, they drove nearly 500 miles (800 kilometres) to Destin on the Florida Panhandle. Neighbours told the couple the hurricane destroyed their carport and inflicted other damage, but Mr Neuman shrugged, saying their insurance should cover it.

Nearby, Lee and Pamela Essenburm made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a picnic table as cars pulling off the slow-moving interstate waited for parking spaces outside the crowded rest stop.

Their home in Palmetto, on the south end of Tampa Bay, had a tree fall in the backyard. They evacuated fearing the damage would be more severe, worrying Milton might hit as a catastrophic Category 4 or 5 storm.

“I wasn’t going to take a chance on it,” Lee Essenbaum said. “It’s not worth it.”

Milton killed at least 10 people when it tore across central Florida, flooding barrier islands, ripping the roof off the Tampa Bay Rays baseball stadium and spawning deadly tornadoes.

Officials say the toll could have been worse if not for the widespread evacuations. The still-fresh devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene just two weeks earlier probably helped compel many people to flee.

“Helene likely provided a stark reminder of how vulnerable certain areas are to storms, particularly coastal regions,” said Craig Fugate, who served as administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency under president Barack Obama.

“When people see first hand what can happen, especially in neighbouring areas, it can drive behaviour change in future storms.”

Rescue efforts continue in the state of Florida as fears of Hurricane Milton lingers over residents.

Hundreds of people and dozens of animals have been pulled out of floodwaters including a pig named Millie.

Rainfall from Hurricane Milton was increased by 20 to 30 per cent because of the climate crisis, according to a new rapid analysis by World Weather Attribution.

Storms like Milton are now about twice as likely as they would have been without human-caused warming, the group found.

The climate crisis also made wind speeds from the hurricane approximately 10 per cent stronger.

World Weather Attribution said their findings for Milton are similar to those following Hurricane Helene.

Hotter ocean temperatures are known to supercharge hurricanes, helping them intensify. In recent years more hurricanes have been rapidly intensifying, reaching Category 5, the highest on the scale. Milton is the quickest storm on record to rapidly intensify up to Category 5 in the Gulf of Mexico.