During & After a Hurricane

My Experiences with Hurricane Milton

This post is for my creative writing section.

I mostly write about business growth and strategies but I am also a creative writer. If you are more interested in the business side of things, check out the table of contents, to find those posts.

The following is my account of the day Milton hit my town and a few days following.

Living in Florida means being prepared for hurricane season. I have lived here since I was 2 years old so I would say I know how to prepare for a hurricane as I have been through maybe 5? I lose count. Hurricane Irma is still stuck in my brain to this day.

If you want to read about the days leading up to the hurricane, check out this post.

Wednesday, October 9th 2024

Sometime in the afternoon

The hurricane rain bands are starting to touch our coast. The wind begins to pick up.

I wanted to add that the reason we stayed is because we are inland and elevated and our house is newer so it is built to hurricane standards. We have metal shutters on our windows and our garage door is built to withstand up to 170 mph wind gusts.

Up until this point, I debated leaving because they said the hurricane reached a category 5! Yikes.

It was too late to leave at this point. It did reduce to a category 3 I believe when it hit our coast.

Earlier in the day, I said goodbye to family members who are evacuating at the last minute and making my nerves raw because they waited so long.

If you are reading this, family, I love you but please try not wait until the last second next time!

I thought I might be able to go to my coaching meeting today but nope…

I cannot focus on work right now.

In the meantime, I am cooking some food and freezing it in case we need to use up everything in the fridge and in case Blake’s inverter idea doesn’t work.

What is the inverter idea? He found a way to connect the car engine to an inverter to try to run the refrigerator. (More on this later in the post)

Back to our regularly scheduled program: Remember my angry bird from this post? I think this is him again!

I have to stop typing because I need to prep more.

Then I shut my computers down to prevent them from being fried with a surge.

I have surge protectors but I am hypervigilant about these kinds of things especially because I make my living with my computers with online counseling and online coaching and writing etc. So the rest of this I wrote by hand and took a few more videos to catalog my experiences.

As I am writing this, part of me wants to avoid it.

Between 4pm-6pm

The winds begin picking up more toward the end of these sequence/time lapse videos. You hear me laughing because that is how I cope. Also, the winds were not yet terrifying.

In the early evening

Blake and I ate dinner and watched a show together. We tried to distract our minds from the pending hurricane.

Around 7pm

We were sitting outside for a while and watched and felt the massive strength of the wind while sitting in our porch. You can hear the gusts as they blow through and are captured by my ancient smart phone.

Blake actually walked around a bit in the yard and checked the house. He is braver than I. You can hear the frogs chirping toward the end of the video. At least the frogs were happy.

The Rest of the Evening is a Blur!

I am listening to Denis Phillips with ABC Live Action News and Fox 13 Tampa Bay which has a great weather app. It sounds like the eye is approaching land according to the news. Who knows at this point where exactly it is going.

I remember Dennis Phillips saying they cannot predict the “wobble.”

I can also hear the gusts hitting our windows. It’s loud! I don’t know how to describe it, it’s like a howling. You can also see the curtains move a little each time the gust hits. And our windows are closed and have those metal shutters I told you about.

I suddenly heard a loud clink on the window!

I knew Blake was sitting outside and I immediately panicked as I knew Blake is amazed by the awesomeness of nature and the wind and the power of the storm. I ran to the porch window and could not find him. I continued breathing quickly and worrying. I looked out the porch further and opened the door.

I yelled for him.

No response.

My heart sank for a moment.

Then I see him. I open the door and though I don’t usually believe in yelling. I raised my voice and said “get in here!”

He explained he was checking the house again to make sure everything was okay.

I must have looked terrified because he laughed at me. He also laughs when he is nervous.

The power went out at some point and the rest I had to account in my written journal the following day.

Thursday October 10^th 2024

7:30am

It has been a terrifying blur.

Now I have some time to reflect back.

I finally think I fell asleep at about 2 or maybe 3am.

Blake, my husband, has not slept for days because he was preparing our house. I prepared by washing all the clothes and bedding just in case we could not wash clothes for a few weeks.

During hurricane Irma, which happened in 2017, the power was out in our old house for 3 or so weeks because our breaker blew and we needed to order a new one. The house was an older wood frame house built in 1945 and the wiring was not very updated and the breaker went in probably in the 80’s so we had to order this part which was no longer production.

So in case that happened or something similar, we wanted to be prepared.

I also cooked up some food from the freezer and cooked any food that would expire easily so it could be frozen or eaten quickly during the days ahead.

Reflecting back to last night

During one part I was thinking that we got through it and felt some relief after the wind had been howling and the shutters had been shaking.

But I spoke too soon.

It was not at all over…

I cannot remember what time it was but some part of the upper left eye wall I believe hit us. The metal shutters had been rattling earlier but now they sounded like they might fly off. I said as much to Blake and he said he went outside earlier to check that they were bolted down well and he said they were. He tried to comfort me and said it sounds like a sheet of metal and when you move it, it sounds really loud but they are not going to fly off. He said they are just loud when wind hits or when debris hits them.

Remember I said in other posts I am neurodivergent?

Right now with thinking back to this occurrence, I hear the song Riders on the Storm by the Doors in my brain.

That’s how my brain works, lol. Any storm type thoughts or memories come to mind. I could go down a rabbit hole and explain memory networks to you but I won’t. I talk a little about memory networks here. You can choose if you want to read on or go to learn about those.

So I was hearing that loud rattling and hugged my husband and he tried to comfort me but I was tearing up uncontrollably. My tears were streaming down my face and I just could not stop them. The cats didn’t seem too scared and hung out with us. They are always a source of comfort.

The storm felt and sounded worse than Irma, at least to me. And maybe I forgot a bit about Irma.

Maybe it was because there was no commotion or distractions for me with Milton and all I could focus on was the storm.

For Irma, we went to a friend’s house because we were concerned about our old wood frame house. We distracted each other with good food, games and conversation.

With Milton I heard everything. The roof was being hit with something and it was so difficult not knowing what it was!

We kept hearing loud thumps almost like someone was stomping up there.

On the sides of the house we kept hearing banging and crashing against the walls and the shutters.

I kept visualizing and catastrophizing with seeing the roof fly off and running to our “safe room” which was the bathroom in the middle of the house.

The plan was to hide in that room in the tub, hugging our cats, under a wood table.

Our roof did not fly off, however, and we sustained some damage to the roof but it held.

As I said in my last post, I often turn to my faith when facing life’s difficult challenges, traumas and dilemmas. I know people ask me why do bad things happen if there is a good God and I say I don’t really have those answers. That is something I will have to ask him someday.

Back to Right Now

Blake is now, the day after, walking around the house and taking pictures of the damage. He is cleaning up the driveway. He begins moving around the cars to get the car ready to test the inverter.

I walk around too and start taking pictures and filming. There are roof shingles everywhere. A mail box is down across the street one of the heavy duty ones. We have pieces of someone’s roof gutters on our lawn. Our neighbor’s fence was down.

Our house looks mostly okay but it appeared there were some roof tiles missing. Blake will go up on the roof later to inspect further.

Back to the inverter. I am so grateful for my savvy husband who understands all of these interesting gadgets.

Now he is reading the instructions to connect the inverter. Again, I really know very little about this stuff but it looks like he connected the inverter to our battery as well as the alternator. He said the power goes from the engine to the alternator, to the battery, to the inverter, to the plug and then to the refrigerator. He is babysitting it to make sure it is working and not destroying the car. He has a kill switch in case something goes wrong.

Prior to connecting it, he read he needed to ground the inverter to the chassis? He worried about the cars electronics so he grounded it into the ground instead.

As I am writing this, he says to me, if you put this in your blog, let them know that “I did this a little ‘hillbilly,’” and he warns to “not try this at home” as it may not be safe.

Warning: I want to emphasize, do not try to add an inverter to your car unless you are trained in understanding cars, inverters, electrical stuff, grounding things, and other mechanical aspects, because it is dangerous and you could harm the car and yourself.

It worked! Now our refrigerator is cooling our food.

We ventured out later in the day to check on a family members house to see if it was okay while they evacuated.

Below is a video of our traveling to their house and what we saw.

You can see a great deal of water in areas where there should not be water.

When we arrived at their house, it did not look too bad from the front but in the back, we saw several trees down, their fence was destroyed. The whole huge oak tree was uprooted by the storm. This was quite upsetting to them as it had been there for a long time. So many other trees were torn down so Blake had to climb them to take a look at the back of the house. My family member said they were grateful that the trees did not hit their house or their screens.

Friday, October 11th 2024

The power is still out. Blake is powering up the inverter twice daily to keep our refrigerator cool. I am hanging out with cats, cooking food and doing what I can to organize as we wait for the power to be restored.

Cats & Spaghettis

At around 7pm the power was restored. Many did not have their power restored for days and some it is taking weeks. Later on, Blake was able to evaluate the roof and there is some damage. We are looking into resources and our house insurance to see how we can repair it.

In the following days, I try to get back to “normal.” I start to feel better and get back into a work routine, but then I hit a wall of exhaustion. I read that this is normal following the stress, fear and adrenaline that many of us experienced.

I know our situation is not too bad but so many lost their homes completely and this is awful.

If you or someone you know has experienced loss due to the hurricanes, check out this post for some resources I have discovered and volunteer opportunities where you can help if interested. I will try to keep it updated as I learn of more resources.