“So, what do we do if we go home and the house is, like, completely trashed?”
I knew the situation was actually bad when my dad said he didn’t know. He’s supposed to know everything, of course, and the only times he hasn’t been able to give me an answer has been when something is going very wrong. As Jim Cantore livestreamed from the bridge just five minutes away from my house, I had a sinking feeling that this wasn’t like every other hurricane.
To add insult to injury, as the newscasters demonstrated what 10 feet of water would do to my city, Manatee County was still reeling from the effects of Hurricanes Debby and Helene. I thought about how 175 mph wind, which is what the wind speed was when I asked my dad about the house, would surely send the sizable pile of tree limbs in our yard into our living room. I thought about whether our house, which is over a hundred years old, would even be standing after that.
We knew it would probably weaken from a Category Five to a Three or Four. But the storm surge had already been kicked up from Cat Five winds – and it was projected to barrel right into Manatee County. The forecast map from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts had placed their landfall prediction on the bay between St. Petersburg and Sarasota. There was a map containing several landfall models, including the ECMWF, which had a big red dot nestled into the bay on top of a bridge. A bridge that happens to be five minutes from my house. Awesome!
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Just a week and a half prior, Helene hit Bradenton hard. Our yard had about three feet of water in it and both of our cars were totaled, as you can see in the picture above. Trash and debris floated in the Olympic pool that was once our driveway. Christmas decorations that were once stored in Rubbermaid bins under the house bobbed past our deck. The water kept rising well after the storm passed, too. We had never had flooding like that before. Hurricane Debby, which only hit Manatee County as a tropical storm, caused widespread flooding in our area that resulted in $56M in damages. It also caused my neighbors to kayak through the streets, but that’s beside the point. Debby was manageable for us, though, so we never expected to get flooding like we did with Helene because it was unimaginable. We live in Flood Zone A, but we genuinely had never expected that our house could get swallowed by the bay.
When we heard the news that Milton might bring double the amount of storm surge that Helene did, we decided to pack up and get the hell out of Manatee County. My parents packed their important documents, our pets and some hurricane snacks, and they set out on Monday morning to pick me up from Gainesville. It’s normally about a three-hour drive from Bradenton to Gainesville. The insane evacuation traffic made it a little over six hours, even with the state having opened up emergency lanes for people to use as regular lanes. There were accidents, cars out of gas and one abandoned dog tied to a pole on I-75. Pure chaos.
The rest of the drive to Tallahassee was much calmer on the backroads, but that didn’t ease the tension in the air as ominous black clouds settled in the southwest coast. Once we made it to our hotel, which had completely sold out until Saturday, all we could do was wait and pray. We were all thankful for our safety and health but it had been a very long two weeks for my family. One hurricane, two totaled cars, a medical emergency with my dad, and now another hurricane, which would potentially leave our beautiful blue home sloshing in pieces around the bay.
There’s a lot of emotions that come with knowing you may legitimately return from evacuation and not have a livable or recognizable home. Especially knowing how hard my parents fought to work hard and buy that house, knowing the hours they spent renovating, knowing the memories we made in our neighborhood, knowing it might not be there in a few days. It’s hard to encapsulate those feelings in a few words. I’ve never been scared of hurricanes, and I’ve always been the type who would rather sit through it than run from it. But this felt different, and the uneasiness was present in my whole city. Families who had stayed through every hurricane in the past several decades were evacuating for the first time; families who had watched their first floor flood many times were evacuating for the first time.
So on Wednesday night, we watched Anderson Cooper livestream from Riverwalk, a park just minutes from my house. All we could do was wait to see where the eye went. Miles made all the difference; just 10 or 20 miles more north or south would drastically change whether or not our house became part of the bay. It ended up hitting Siesta Key, about 20 miles south of my house. We were lucky. Very, very lucky.
The northern eyewalls of hurricanes are much more gracious than the southern eyewalls. When a city is on the southern side, that’s where all of the storm surge gets pushed. The northern side doesn’t get that – they get a reverse storm surge. It happened in Tampa Bay in 2022 with Hurricane Ian, and it happened again with Hurricane Milton. We were spared from the floodgates opening directly into my house, but we still had Category Three winds hitting and potentially sending the debris from Helene flying all over the place.
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When we returned home, we were pleasantly surprised. Our upper deck gave out, as you can see in the above picture, and our yard was a complete mess. But the house was OK! We had a lot of work to do, and would probably need new railings on the deck, a roof inspection and a debris removal service, but it could have been much worse. The seals between our roof and ceiling gave way, meaning there was dirt and rain in the house, and somehow our front door busted open from the pressure and wind, and we are still out of power at the time of writing this article on October 15th. So, I swept the dirt off my slightly damp bed and slept like a little farm animal for the night. I wish that were a joke or an exaggeration. As gross as it was, I felt very blessed that our house was still standing, and I still had a roof over my head.
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Not everyone in Manatee County was as lucky as we were. A friend of mine lost their roof. A friend of a friend had their house collapse and lost everything. Our iconic Rod & Reel Pier on Anna Maria Island isn’t much of a pier anymore. It’s disheartening to see your city experience these kinds of events and it’s very strange to have been lucky enough not to see severe damage like others did. I’m grateful for this, of course, but words can’t explain the feelings.
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I can say I survived Hurricane Milton. Now let’s not do this again, OK?