The Florida Towns Hit Hardest By Hurricane Milton (Pics + Videos)

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Hurricane Milton damage on Manasota Key near Sarasota, Florida

Getty Image / Joe Raedle

Hurricane Milton made landfall on Siesta Key last Wednesday night as a category 3 storm, which is considered a ‘major hurricane,’ and something I’ve been hearing nonstop in the days since is how the region ‘dodged a bullet’ once again, a statement that doesn’t square up with an estimated damage total of $50 billion.

And Milton came just two weeks after Hurricane Helene brought catastrophic storm surge to much of the Gulf Coast of Florida before hitting the Carolinas and inflicted a total damage cost of between $30.5 billion and $47.5 billion to the Southeast. In my hometown, they expected things to be a lot worse than Helene because the storm surge was largely unexpected and entirely unprecedented. Homes were wiped out that had never even sniffed storm surge waters in the past 100 years.

Considering that my home was literally in the eye of Hurricane Milton, yeah, I did expect more damage. But I live far enough inland that my home isn’t in an evacuation zone. In fact, there’s an evacuation shelter across the street where I can hear PA announcements for evacuees while I’m walking my dog in the morning and there’s a constant flow of rescue worker vehicles and shuttles for those whose homes were damaged by Helene and then completely wiped out by Hurricane Milton. Those folks don’t need to hear anyone say that we ‘dodged a bullet’ with this storm.

Hurricane Milton Has Changed SW Florida Forever

This is around 30 miles from my house, as the crow flies. Manasota Key is one of the regions hit hardest by Hurricane Milton:

The airport we evacuated from lost its roof and isn’t expected to open for a few days, so after 5 days of flight cancellations due to Milton we eventually bought tickets home into Tampa and had to drive back down to Sarasota where my car was sitting at the airport. Thankfully, it seems okay. It is struggling to start up at times but there at least weren’t any trees laying across my windshield and it wasn’t flipped on its side like the countless number of RVs/Mobile Homes we passed in Bradenton, Florida after getting off I-275.

It’s an odd thing evacuating from your home during a hurricane and then returning to your hometown to find that every parking lot is filled with emergency vehicles and rescue workers. Every hotel you drive past is full at a time of the year when it’s still insanely hot and most (sane minded) people wouldn’t dream of visiting Florida unless they had to.

Everything still looks like ‘home’ but with an apocalyptic filter. There are military helicopters taking off from golf courses you’ve been playing your whole life:

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Your baseball team’s stadium no longer has a roof:

And while I might be able to privately admit to myself that my home got lucky in the eye of Hurricane Milton, because we did, the areas to the immediate south of us… Manasota Key, Little Gasparilla Island, Englewood, Venice, all of these areas received the full force of Milton on the ‘nasty side’ of the storm.

Little Gasparilla Island specifically is a place near and dear to my heart. I used to vacation there as a little kid with my family. Some of my earliest vacation memories are there and I didn’t realize that until I returned there 5 years ago with my own family and it unlocked those core memories I’d forgotten about. I’ve been going back for a week every year and making memories with my son just like I had with my family.

Entire Homes Have Disappeared

That island will never look the same. Many of the ‘old Florida’ homes on stilts have disappeared. All that is left are the wooden stumps that used to hold up homes. NOAA has a dedicated Hurricane Milton satellite imagery page that shows how hard areas were hit.

Hurricane Milton damage on Little Gasparilla Island

NOAA

Moving north to Stump Pass, there are now two waterways. The beach was split in half:

Stump Pass, Florida

NOAA

Entire neighborhoods were destroyed with mountains of debris getting caught by mangrove islands so the egrets and pelicans are now roosting in trees filled with mountains of lost memories:

Englewood Beach damage Hurricane Milton

NOAA

While all of this is going on and people are coming to grips with the scope of devastation, the governor found time to pile trash behind his podium for a press conference to create the appearance of being in the thick of things:

I’m not trying to take a cheap shot here but as someone born and raised where Hurricane Milton hit, I’m struggling to understand why he couldn’t have just gone a mile or two further and set the podium up in front of the actual devastation. Kids in this town have missed weeks of school with more disruptions on the way all while staring at the faces of worried adults, parents whose homes were flooded by Debby, covered in sand by Helene, and then leveled by Milton.

My main reason for writing this was to just get a lot off my chest because the last week was beyond stressful, but also as a reminder that while stories like ‘Lieutenant Dan’ may go viral, behind those are millions of people whose lives were forever changed by this storm. Many homes will never be rebuilt and they certainly won’t be inhabitable by the holiday season which SW Florida relies on for tourism dollars.

The lack of money coming into the region through tourism (Sarasota saw $4.47 billion from tourism last year) will be felt in the years to come. Many will choose to leave forever. While some homes might’ve ‘dodged a bullet’ the impacts of this storm will be felt for decades to come and the reality of that has not set in for many of the people (my family, my neighbors) that I’ve talked to so far.

Countless life-altering decisions will be made in the coming days so if you’ve read this far just please do me a favor and go easy on the ‘Floridians had this coming’ jokes for a few months because there’s a whole lot more that keeps someone tied to a region than signing a lease or buying a home. I need to shut this down before I keep rambling and I appreciate all of the readers who reached out via social media over the past few days.

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