Hurricane Milton struck on Thursday, and it was devastating to the local area. I came through it in good shape, with only moderate damage to my neighborhood, but let me back up, because the fact that I was fine does not mean the storm was gentle. It was terrifying. The evening it hit was a nightmare that ran from about two hours before landfall until the next morning, relentless the entire time, and I stayed awake on pure adrenaline until I finally collapsed into sleep from sheer exhaustion.
Morning showed the aftermath. Trees snapped in half. Cars in the neighborhood crushed under fallen branches. Houses with trees lying across their roofs. The lake behind my house had risen to an alarming level, nearly spilling over its banks, and there were reports of alligators moving through the flooded streets, though I never saw one myself. What I did see were swarms of vicious mosquitoes breeding in the standing water, and streets flooded badly enough that getting out was impossible for a couple of days.
The rainfall was staggering. Milton dropped a record-breaking 14.5 inches on my area in just a few hours. And yet the news that mattered most was good: power came back only twelve hours after the storm passed, far sooner than anyone expected, with the internet following shortly after. I came out of it well. No damage to my place, and a hard reminder that the difference between a survivable storm and a ruinous one often comes down to nothing more than which side of a track you happened to be standing on.
Why were the tornadoes worse than the hurricane?
As bad as Milton was, the tornadoes it spawned were worse. The news reported more than two dozen tornadoes across Florida, many of them significant, and entire communities on the eastern side of the state were destroyed by them. The hurricane brought heavy rain and punishing wind across a wide area, but the tornadoes concentrated that violence into narrow paths and ripped straight through homes, businesses, and infrastructure, leaving total devastation behind.
My area was spared the worst of them. Other parts of Florida were not, and the footage coming out of those places was heartbreaking. A hurricane is a broad, grinding force you can prepare for with supplies and a solid structure. A tornado is a sudden, concentrated one that can obliterate a well-built house in seconds with almost no warning. The recovery for the communities they hit was going to be long and difficult, measured in months and years, not days.
That distinction is worth holding onto. Preparation greatly improves your odds against the broad threat of the hurricane itself. Against the concentrated randomness of a tornado, preparation buys you less, which is exactly why having your data backed up offsite and your essentials packed in a go-bag matters so much. Some disasters you ride out. Others you can only try to survive and rebuild from, and the readiness you did in advance is what makes the rebuilding possible.
How do you get through the long night of a hurricane?
The storm itself is an endurance event. From two hours before landfall until the following morning, there was no lull, just wind and noise and the constant awareness that any one of the trees around the house could come down in the wrong direction. You do not sleep through that. You wait it out, and waiting is its own kind of hard.
My cat, Zeya, had a rough time of it. She stayed pressed against me the entire night, and I got the distinct sense she was pleading with me to make the storm stop, as though I had any say in it. The howling wind, the crashing trees, the sudden shifts in air pressure all made it a frightening experience for her, the same as it was for me. She is fine now that things have calmed, but it was tough on her, and it is a reminder that the animals who depend on us feel the fear of these events every bit as sharply as we do.
I kept writing to stay busy and keep my mind occupied on something productive until the power finally went out. When it did, I went next door. My neighbor is a prepper, genuinely well-equipped, and this is where all the talk about community during a disaster stops being abstract. I brought eggs, he fired up his camping stove, we added some potatoes, and a few neighbors drifted over until we had a real meal going in the middle of a blackout. Just as we sat down together, the power came back on, right in the middle of the food, and the air conditioning kicking in was the sweetest relief imaginable. It is not the heat in Florida that gets you. It is the humidity, and it is miserable without air conditioning.
What does recovery really take after a hurricane?
The storm exits and the recovery begins, and the recovery is longer than people expect. Between the anxiety leading up to Milton, the stress of the night itself, and the flooded days that followed, I more or less lost two weeks. Client work stalled, marketing efforts paused, the ordinary momentum of a working life simply stopped while the immediate crisis consumed everything.
That lost time is a real cost, and it is one worth planning for. The reason I scheduled a month of work ahead before the storm was precisely so that this stretch of recovery would not leave me invisible or behind. The preparation you do before a storm does more than get you through the storm. It protects the weeks on the far side of it, when you are exhausted, catching up, and trying to rebuild your normal rhythm out of the disruption.
The through-line from the first raindrop to the last day of cleanup is the same one that runs through all of it: readiness before the event determines how hard the recovery is after. Everything I leaned on during and after Milton, the backups, the scheduled work, the go-bag, the supplies, the relationship with a well-prepared neighbor, was set in place before the storm had a name pointed at us.
The book on this: Real World Survival is my field guide to disaster preparedness, written from living through hurricanes, wildfires, and earthquakes.
That is the whole argument of my book Real World Survival: get genuinely ready for the bad day, without letting fear of it run your life the rest of the time. You can find it and the rest of the preparedness writing on the Prepared, Not Paranoid hub. Milton is gone. The lessons it left, and the two weeks it cost, are worth passing along to anyone who has a storm still out there over the water with their name on it.
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