Just over a week after Hurricane Helene brushed past the Tampa Bay area on its way up through the Florida panhandle, Hurricane Milton came across the Gulf from the east and made landfall just south of Tampa Bay, leaving a massive trail of destruction in its wake. We may have dodged this year’s “I”-named hurricane (Isaac) which has historically caused us issues (Idalia in 2023, Ian in 2022, Irma in 2017, and even Irene in 2011), but the one/two punch of Helene and Milton ended up being much worse.

The effects of Helene weren’t actually that bad (at least for us personally) when taken alone. The storm was mostly a wind event as it passed west of us out in the Gulf, with hardly any rain. We had some large branches come off our backyard trees and poke holes in the lanai roof screen panels, but that was it for damage. We only lost power for about 20 minutes after 11:00pm which I suspect was actually due to Duke Energy repairing other outages. The yard debris cleanup was five or six trash bags, and took us 2 hours, again not too bad. Our neighbors did have a large tree branch come over the fence from their neighbors onto their back porch roof, but even that seemed like relatively minor damage. The beach communities were not as lucky, though, with the storm surge causing flooding and leaving large amounts of sand behind … and that cleanup was still going on when Milton came ashore just over a week later.

Helene’s track:

 

The week after Helene, we went up to State College, PA to visit our daughter at Penn State University and also attend the Stripe Out football game against UCLA at Beaver Stadium (FOX Big Noon Saturday was there live too!). During the game, my wife checked her phone and saw all the news about Milton and the projected track. We had “unprepared” the house after finishing our Helene cleanup so it wasn’t properly prepped for another storm. As a result, instead of staying in State College we decided to risk it and fly home on Sunday as planned. After arriving back home, we “re-prepped” the house for the storm. As Monday wore on, it became increasingly apparent that Milton was going to be a monster and was coming right for us. For the first time in the almost 25 years we’ve lived here, we decided to execute our emergency plan and evacuate.

My wife managed to find gas to fill up the tank of the RAV4 earlier in the day (we decided not to evacuate in the EV6) so we loaded in our evacuation supplies (including an extra 5 gallon tank of gas) and headed for my mother-in-law’s up in the panhandle. We were on the road around 7:30pm and hoped we would a) be in the earlier phase of evacuation and b) there’d be less people driving at night. Neither turned out to be true. We avoided the highways and took the back roads (US-19, US-98, US-27) up to Tallahasse, which took us 7 hours in traffic! We managed to find a hotel room downtown and checked in just after 2:30am Tuesday morning. After a few hours’ sleep we left Tallahassee around 8:45am and were at my mother-in-law’s by 10:30am CDT.

We spent the rest of the week glued to the weather and news, watching Milton from afar. It was a surreal experience. The weather was sunny and beautiful up in the panhandle and yet we were seeing places and towns we knew on television. We lost internet service at the house Wednesday evening a few hours before Milton made landfall, so at that point we didn’t have any visibility on what was going on at the house. It was odd going to sleep in the quiet of north Florida knowing that had we stayed home we’d be listening to the raging storm outside. Thursday morning we awoke to all of the news and images, like the roof of Tropicana Field ripped away. We still didn’t have internet at the house (but from what I could tell we did still have power) and weren’t able to reach our neighbors who had stayed home to ride it out … it was unnerving.

Milton’s track:

 

Friday morning, once we had confirmation that all access and bridges to Pinellas county were re-opened, we drove home. Again, we stayed off I-10 and I-275, keeping to the same US routes we used on the way up. There was traffic, more people heading home, but not nearly as bad as what it was like evacuating on Monday night, so we made it home mid-afternoon. We weren’t sure what we were coming home to, and as we got closer and saw more of the damage and debris we started to get worried. There were a lot of big trees down in our neighborhood, but somehow all of ours were still up. I’m not sure how we got as lucky as we did. We had a huge branch fall but miss the pool cage, a few more minor tears in the screens, and another smaller tree partially uprooted but leaning away from the back of the house. But the branches and debris we collected covered our entire front tree lawn, like our neighbors. Rumor has it it will be months before all the debris is collected. We had some water incursion through our front windows, but had had the foresight to pad the windowsills with towels so that aborbed most of it and prevent the water from getting down the wall or on the floor. But we had power and water (internet came back a few days later) and the house was livable. So lucky. Again, it was the beach communities and the areas to the south of us where Milton made landfall that the real devastation occured. Had Milton gone just 12-15 miles further north, into Tampa Bay, it could have been a completely different story for us personally. Another major bullet dodged.

Let’s call this the end of the 2024 tropical storm season, shall we? Everyone here needs a break …

Red Cross: Help people affected by Hurricanes Milton and Helene