As Hurricane Milton heads toward Tampa, resident and writer Terry Ward reflects on the last few days and the city she calls home.
Among my friends in Tampa, we first started hearing about what would soon become Hurricane Milton late last week, while my community was still reeling from Hurricane Helene. Helene made landfall on September 26 in Florida’s Big Bend before blowing a trail of wreckage north through several states, including, most notably, western North Carolina.
“Do you see there’s something else brewing in the Gulf?” I said to a friend on the phone who lived nearby but was currently in Australia. He’d already told me that he’d lost a car in Helene and that the beach had washed straight into his pool at the condo he had just bought in Clearwater Beach.
The storm that rained down holy hell on the beautiful mountain towns of western North Carolina didn’t tread lightly on my state either. Friends from outside Florida were surprised when I told them that despite Helene staying some 100 miles offshore from us in the Tampa area–including St. Pete and the many beautiful beach communities like Pass-a-Grille, Clearwater Beach, and North Redington Beach–were overflowing with the contents of homes and buildings, that had spilled into the streets after several feet of water had rushed inside.
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My townhome in South Tampa, at just eight feet of elevation and a few blocks off Tampa Bay, was unscathed during Helene, and I had to scratch my head at that fact, while also counting my blessings.
Just one street south of where I live, a home had burned down during Helene’s rains and wind. Watermarks on the exteriors of other homes on the same block–and all over town–showed that surge water from the bay (and who knows where else) had forced its way inside and taken no prisoners–dresses, cabinets, guitars, yearbooks, stuffed animals, and everything in between was piled on curb after curb, awaiting removal.
Helene was the worst storm in a century for Tampa Bay. But now I can see that it was a warning for the region.
Tampa hasn’t experienced a direct hit from a major hurricane since October 25, 1921, when the city experienced a storm surge as high as 11 feet.
And I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’ve noticed a general false sense of security at times in my city, although hardly from everyone. There’s this idea that we always, somehow, dodge a direct hit from a hurricane at the last minute, including Ian in 2022 and now Helene. And perhaps that’s because we always have dodged them, at least in our lifetimes.
To say the last five days have felt surreal is an understatement.
On Friday, October 4, I went to the Morgan Wallen concert at Raymond James Stadium, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play, and danced and sang along with more than 100,000 country music fans to hits like “Whiskey Glasses” and “Cowgirls.”
Surely, many of them knew already, like I did, that something was out there percolating again in the too-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. I remember bathing in those waters in early June and feeling a sense of dread that they were already as warm as they were then.
The next morning, on Saturday, on the way into my kids’ basketball games at the South Tampa YMCA, I noticed people filling sandbags in the parking lot. The pile had recently replenished after having been depleted to dregs just the week before as Helene approached.
I called my husband to say it wasn’t crowded yet, and we might want to take advantage of the moment, too. After all, hurricane season runs through November 30. By the time my son’s game ended, I went on Facebook, and saw local meteorologist Denis Phillips announce that Tropical Depression 14 had developed in the southwest Gulf of Mexico.
That night, I hosted a party at my place for Libra Season for a few of my favorite local Libras, including my sister and some of my best neighborhood friends. My birthday is October 9, the day Hurricane Milton is expected to make landfall in either the Tampa Bay region or just south, in Sarasota.
We enjoyed a night of music and laughs astride the retention pond my community clusters around for social occasions, something we often do–and most often in my small yard. We like to joke in our little community that we’ve arrived, since we’re finally “waterfront in Florida” on that tiny retention pond home to ducks and turtles. But things weren’t quite as carefree as normal. The tropical storm, which was destined to become another hurricane, was already on our minds, and we talked about how we’d have to start serious prep the next day and wondered when school would be canceled and how many more makeup days we’d have to do atop Helene’s count.
A few hours after going to bed that night, at 3 a.m. Sunday morning, I woke up, checked the worsening updates on the storm, felt a hint of panic set in, and booked one-way tickets for myself, my kids, and my husband to Richmond, Virginia, near where my parents live, for the next morning.
On Sunday, we got the anticipated text messages and a call from the county that school was indeed canceled through Wednesday. Notices soon after went out that city parking garages would be free for people needing to store cars up high from floodwater.
I felt relieved that my kids wouldn’t have to take a vacation day, which was immediately followed by a pit in my stomach that still hasn’t left me, but has turned into a tight knot. My husband and I spent the day moving everything from the ground floor of the house upstairs. I packed my jewelry and gathered all of our important paper documents from a cabinet collecting dust, along with some of my favorite family photos. I packed the kids’ clothes and moved some stuff I wouldn’t want to lose if the roof were to fail down from the third floor to the second. They were grim tasks, but ones we did before Hurricane Ian, too. But this already felt different. The mandatory evacuation notices for Zones A and B in our city didn’t arrive until Monday, but we knew they were coming. We made the decision that my husband wouldn’t take the flight north with us after all and would continue shoring up the house as best he could and then evacuate locally. That way, he could be back quickly once the dust settled after the storm and whenever the police would allow us to return home.
It is crazy, the decisions you have to make in a moment like this. It is a privilege to be able to evacuate. There is fear and gratitude and a sense of urgency like no other. Many things happen. Neighbors who have never before talked start a conversation. Some people choose to stay in an evacuation zone because they can’t afford to get out, or their car was flooded during Helene, or they don’t want to go to a shelter, or they’re sick. Or or or. Their reasons are theirs. Friends might offer you to come to their house for a hurricane party and to stay safe–then take it back when they realize they don’t have enough supplies for anyone else, or they finally decide that they, too, are leaving.
I was relieved when I stepped onto the plane at 6 a.m. Monday to fly north, but sad to leave my husband behind. I do not fear for his safety so much as I know he has plans to drive to a friend’s place in a safer area to the north of us, away from water and beyond the mandatory evacuation zone where we live. But it is a discomforting goodbye to have to make, nonetheless. Some of my neighbors have said they aren’t leaving. I fear for their safety. Our mayor, Jane Castor, said that people who don’t evacuate from mandatory zones “are going to die.” Also, Jim Cantore from The Weather Channel is already digging in and reporting from the ground in Tampa–a signal anyone used to hurricanes knows is an awful sign of things to come.
Whatever you feel and think about Tampa and Florida and its people, I can tell you this… They are a real slice of the real America. They are my neighbors.
I have written many glowing accolades about my city, Tampa, for travel publications, including this one. I’ve focused on its exciting new downtown district, Water Street Tampa, with its flashy restaurants and on our first “true five-star hotel,” The Tampa EDITION, itself now in Evacuation Zone A, the first area to have a mandatory evacuation, after mobile homes. I’ve written about the area’s miles of beautiful beaches, their sands like talcum powder, how you can see manatees by the hundreds in the winter at Tampa Electric’s Manatee Viewing Station, how Bayshore Boulevard (recently fully underwater during Hurricane Helene) is said to be the longest continuous sidewalk in the world.
But all of that is nothing compared to the people who live here, who I have never waxed on about.
Whatever you feel and think about Tampa and Florida and its people, I can tell you this. They come from all over the world, they are Republicans and Democrats and people who don’t vote or care at all. They are immigrants who arrived through Central America from countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and from much farther away in Africa and Asia, too. They are people who’ve never lived anywhere else. They are Navy SEALS, artists of international acclaim. They are atheists and people who never miss a Sunday sermon at a strip mall church. They are travelers of the world and people with no passports. They are a real slice of the real America. They are my neighbors. And now along with the country and much of the world, they are waiting to see what happens to the city and state they call home.
I have received many messages of concern and love these last days from near and far, from close friends and people I haven’t heard from in many years. The world is watching us. It feels comforting, of course, and I need it. It’s also very frightening.
As for Florida, it stirs a lot of emotions in people. It always has. If there is a bright side in all of this already, it’s that the emotions stirring right now–and hopefully in the tough days, weeks, and months ahead–will be ones of empathy and love.