Weathering the storm

“My television and phone kept screeching with alerts about tornadoes. My worst nightmare was the fear of being without utilities for days or weeks,” Dennis D’Amato said.

D’Amato recalled Hurricane Milton, the Category 3 storm that made landfall on the western coast of Florida last month. It caused a lot of concern because it approached Florida as a Category 5 hurricane with winds as high as 180 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service online. Once it moved onto land, it toned down to a Category 3 storm with winds about 120 miles per hour.

“My home is nine miles from the coast, and I felt confident that my home would survive Hurricane Milton,” D’Amato continued. “I could not see outside as I had all my shutters over all of the windows. ”

D’Amato worried about the potential damage to property and people.

“Fortunately, I did not lose power nor cell service, and the worst part of the storm for me was, I could hear the wind so loud. I was fearful that a tornado would touch down near me,” he said.

The National Weather Service confirmed that Hurrican Milton caused 19 tornadoes on land. A tornado forms by having instability in the atmosphere over mostly flat lands, according to the service’s website.

“During the storm we had a tornado come through our front yard which we never expected, but luckily our house didn’t suffer any damage, but it did rip out a massive palm tree from the ground and toppled over our street lights,” Sean DeLany said. He owns a home in Sarasota, Florida.

The storm hit his home the evening of October 9. DeLany spent days preparing his house if it flooded by moving out the entire first floor and sandbagging and putting waterproof tarps outside all our doors.

“Before the storm hit I was definitely nervous and scared that our house was going to get flooded from the storm. Our house is close to the water so being flooded is a much greater concern than wind damage,” he explained.

“I love weather, and I had been watching the news for a while reporting on the potential storm coming our way. Once we got word that Milton was in fact coming to the Gulf Coast of Florida, we started to get very nervous and scared of what the potential impacts could be,” Kelsy DeLany said.

They were among the thousands of Florida residents forced to leave their home.

“We were in Evacuation Zone A, so we evacuated our home after putting up tarps and sand bags to hopefully keep any potential water out of our home,” DeLany said.