Hurricane Milton updates: 16 dead across Florida in storm's aftermath

A tornado that tore through Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, during Milton has been preliminarily rated EF-3 with winds of 140 mph, the National Weather Service in Miami said Thursday.

"Several strong tornadoes developed within rainbands associated with Hurricane Milton. This is the first and very preliminary EF rating for one of those tornadoes," the NWS said.

The tornado had a "relatively long track," and the EF-3 preliminary rating was "based on just one neighborhood which was also one of the hardest hit," the NWS said.

"Considerable structural damage" was seen in the Avenir community in Palm Beach Gardens, with damage to homes including large sections of roof torn off, it said.

The EF Scale estimates a tornado's intensity on a scale from 0 to 5, according to the NWS.

Storm surveys for Milton will take several days to complete, it said.

The operator of a sanitation company in North Fort Myers, Florida, captured the moment when an alligator popped out of the water and bit at his van’s tire early Thursday morning as he traveled down a flooded street.

"That was a big-a-- alligator that just bit our tire," a stunned Dave Rieser told the driver of the van. "Wait til we go back to this video. I hope I got it."

"It was no little gator, either," he added.

A man who was found floating dozens of miles off of Florida's Gulf Coast while clinging to a cooler to keep him afloat, was rescued Thursday, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

Officials said an Air Station Miami 65 helicopter crew rescued the man who was approximately 30 miles off Longboat Key, a town along the state's central-west coast.

Read more about the rescue here.

Six deaths have been reported in hard-hit St. Lucie County due to Milton. One of the victims was Debra Kennedy, 66, who was killed after a tornado struck Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, a retirement community in Fort Pierce, her daughter Brandi Smith told ABC News.

Smith said that Kennedy, a mother of two and grandmother who went by Debbie, had moved from Cayuga County, New York, to Florida in March to care for Smith's ailing father, to whom Kennedy had previously been married for 42 years.

"I just want everybody to know what an amazing mother she has always been," Smith said. "She's always there for us two girls and all of her grandchildren absolutely adored her and she's been there for the birth of all of them."

Smith said she is working to raise funds to bring her mother back home to New York so she can bury her next to her father.

"She will be missed more than I can even say and I'm very sorry to everybody else who lost family during this," Smith said.

-ABC News' Christopher Looft