BRANDON, Fla. (AP) — Florida residents who fled hundreds of miles to escape Hurricane Milton made slow drives home on crowded highways, exhausted from the long drives and the cleanup that awaited them, but also grateful to make it back alive.

“I love my house, but I'm not dying in it,” Fred Neuman said Friday as he walked his dog outside a rest stop on Interstate 75 north of Tampa.

Neuman and his wife live in Siesta Key, where Milton made landfall Wednesday evening as a strong Category 3 hurricane. They followed local evacuation orders ahead of the storm and drove nearly 500 miles (800 kilometers) to Destin on the Florida Panhandle. Neighbors told the couple the hurricane destroyed their carport and caused other damage, but Neuman shrugged it off and said their insurance should cover it.

Nearby, Lee and Pamela Essenburm prepared peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a picnic table as cars exiting the slow-moving highway waited for parking at the crowded rest stop. At her home in Palmetto, on the south end of Tampa Bay, a tree fell into the backyard. They evacuated because they feared the damage would be more severe and feared Milton could hit as a catastrophic Category 4 or 5 storm.

“I didn’t want to take any chances,” Lee Essenbaum said. “It's not worth it.”

Milton killed at least ten people as it swept through central Florida, flooding barrier islands and tearing off the roof Tampa Bay Rays ′ Baseball stadium and spawn deadly tornadoes.

Officials say the death toll could have been even worse had the widespread evacuations not occurred. The still fresh devastation caused by Hurricane Helene just two weeks earlier may have contributed to many people having to flee.

“Helene probably served as a stark reminder of how vulnerable certain areas are to storms, particularly coastal regions,” said Craig Fugate, who served as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency under President Barack Obama. “If people see firsthand what can happen, especially in neighboring areas, it may lead to behavioral changes during future storms.”

In the coastal city of Punta Gorda, Mayor Lynne Matthews said rescuers only had to rescue three people from floodwaters after Milton's death, compared to 121 rescues after the Helene flood.

“So people listened to the evacuation order,” Matthews said at a news conference Friday, noting that local authorities made sure residents heard him. “We had teams with megaphones going through all of our trailer parks and other locations to let people know they needed to evacuate.”

As of Friday evening, the number of customers in Florida who still had no power had fallen to 1.9 million poweroutage.us. St. Petersburg's 260,000 residents have been told to boil water before drinking, cooking or brushing their teeth until at least Monday.

Traffic slowed to a crawl on stretches of I-75 as evacuees' vehicles crowded alongside a steady stream of delivery trucks heading south toward Tampa. While the densely populated city and surrounding Hillsborough County accounted for nearly a quarter of the remaining power outages, the hurricane spared Tampa a direct hit and the deadly storm surge that scientists feared never came about.

But Gov. Ron DeSantis warned people not to be careful, citing ongoing safety threats including downed power lines and standing water that could hide dangerous items.

“We are now in a time where there are preventable deaths,” DeSantis said Friday. “You have to make the right decisions and know that there are dangers out there.”

In coastal Pinellas County, the sheriff's office used high-water vehicles to ferry people back and forth to their homes in a flooded neighborhood of Palm Harbor where waters continued to rise.

Madeleine Jiron, her husband and their dog Harry Potter got into the sheriff's truck to drive to their neighborhood. They were just arriving home after being evacuated to Tallahassee.

“We don’t know what kind of damage we have,” Jiron said. “We’ll see when we get there.”

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Farrington reported from St. Petersburg. Associated Press journalists Chris O'Meara in Lithia, Florida; Curt Anderson in Tampa; Terry Spencer outside Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Stephany Matat in Fort Pierce, Fla.; Freida Frisaro in Fort Lauderdale; and Rebecca Santana in Washington contributed.