I am writing this a little late because, in case you haven’t heard, we have been hit by back to back hurricanes Helene and Milton. Before I tell you my story, you need to know that the folks in Asheville North Carolina and the surrounding area got much worse and are still reeling. There are several organizations that are doing a lot to help including the Salvation Army.

I have lived in the Tampa Bay area since 1967 and been through countless hurricanes. The nightmare scenario is that the hurricane would come right up Tampa bay at high tide. Between the rain and the storm surge, flooding would have been massive. Helene and Milton are the two worst that I have been through. Helene brought a lot of flooding. A large percentage of the older homes just a few blocks from me had two to three feet of water inside. There is block after block of furniture and dry wall piled up in front yards. Many of those homes will be torn down. In fact they have already started. The upside is that most of these places, the houses aren’t worth anything, all of the value is in the land. When they rebuild, the first floor is built four to six feet higher and will include many hurricane protection features. Since we live in evacuation zone A, we went to our shop which is in zone C. The only prep we did was to bring everything inside and bring important files and photo albums with us. We never lost power at either our house or shop and actually contemplated going back home after most of the storm passed us at about 10 o’clock at night but thought better of it and stayed put. Turns out one person was killed at about 2 am when a road sign on the interstate fell on their car. When we did return the next morning, it was shocking to see the extent of the flooding so close to our house. We only lost one day in the shop and were back to work the next day.

A week later, Milton formed in the western Gulf of Mexico and was headed directly for Tampa is what was shaping up to be the worst case scenario. After seeing what Helene did, we took this one more seriously. We built dams out of lumber and heavy plastic welding curtains for our doors at home then screwed and caulked them in place. We put all of our expensive furniture up on tables. We installed remote monitoring cameras and we moved our 1950 Ford F1 to the shop. Again, we gathered all important documents and photo albums and took them with us to the shop. We also added most of our clothes so we would have something to wear afterwards. Several of our friends who got flooded in Helene were wearing the same clothes for days. This one felt different so we closed the shop on Monday to give everyone time to prepare. We left our house Wednesday morning to what looked like a ghost town. The only preparation we did at the shop was to bring everything inside and waited it out. I was most worried about flooding if it came up Tampa bay but it took a slight turn southward and weakened to a disorganized category 3 before the center hit about 50 miles south of us. This actually sucked the water out of Tampa bay so that there was no surge. There was a lot of rain though. We have a large drainage ditch running along the north side of the shop. The water in it is usually only a foot or two deep with an additional seven to eight feet of bank. I woke up about 3 am and saw that it looked full. I went into the shop and we had 3-4 inches of water everywhere. The office is up higher and was not affected and there was no real damage in the shop. By morning all that was left were puddles. There was some minor wind damage to the outside of the building and all of the upstairs windows leaked causing the ceiling tile over my bed to fall down on me in the middle of the night. Karl told me I should move my bed but I did not listen. I hate that he is always right. The power was still on at home but we had lost power at the shop so we remained closed. We saw a different kind of devastation when we returned home this time. A lot of massive trees down, more than I have ever seen before, 100 year old oaks were either split in half or were completely uprooted. Three of the four streets that lead to my house were blocked. Swann Circle Park, just behind my house, lost dozens of trees. Power returned at about 9 pm Sunday night so we texted everyone and told them we would be open if they wanted to come in. We were closed for a week.

The morning after the storm, 85% of Tampa Electric customers, were without power. That is around 850,000 locations. They predicted to be back to normal by tonight (Thursday) at midnight. As I am writing this, there are about 10,000 locations without power. That is impressive as hell. While this may be the worst two hurricanes I have been through, Florida has seen many that were worse and they do a remarkable job of getting things back to normal quickly. The folks in North Carolina were hit with a 100 year event and are still reeling. Please keep them in your prayers and if you can, please give to help them.