Peter Kloeppel has lived in Florida since his TV retirement. There he witnessed Hurricane “Milton” sweeping across the US state – a “frightening” experience for the former RTL news anchor.
Peter Kloeppel gives the all-clear: Although the former news anchor’s home in Florida was hit directly by the center of Hurricane Milton, he and his family are doing well. “Nothing happened to us, thank God. Our house is solidly built, but trees fell down in the neighborhood,” the 65-year-old reported in an interview with his ex-RTL colleague Roberta Bieling.
Kloeppel and his wife “nothing has happened to their body or soul.” Nevertheless, the natural disaster poses challenges for the couple: “We have no electricity,” explained Kloeppel, who contacted his former broadcaster via shaky cell phone video. He has lived in Florida since August 2024; The journalist had already regularly commuted between Germany and the USA.
“We’ve never experienced anything like this before”
“What we experienced was something that we have actually never experienced before in a hurricane – and this was not the first for us,” explained Kloeppel. “The eye of the storm passed right over us. That means: We had extreme winds here, 150, 160 kilometers per hour, sometimes even more in gusts. And then, within a few minutes – total silence.”
This silence lasted “about an hour” until the center of the hurricane moved on. “Then the storm started again, but from the other direction,” Kloeppel remembered. Observing this was “very impressive”, but also “frightening”. Now the long-time “RTL Aktuell” presenter is relieved to be unharmed and hopes “that the next few hours and days do not claim too many victims.”
