Results of the Storm

They told us Milton was going to go north and hit Tampa. After we lost power and cell signal on Wednesday afternoon, the hurricane turned and came ashore 8 miles from our house at our favorite beach in the world. The roaring wind was pretty bad. We only found out we were the direct hit when we got cell signal back for a few minutes when the eye was right over us and we could make a few calls. We ran the dogs outside to potty while it was calm and still. Then the wind came back even stronger than before. It was 2 am before it let up. 

 

 

 

After the storm, the sun came out again. 

 

 

We walked around the house and this was our only damage - the top came off our royal palm and landed right at the base in the front yard. Daryl and Parker made short work of getting it out to the curb. With Ian (whose eye also went over us), we lost our front doors, had flooding in the dining room, lost our floors and our pool screens. We are so thankful that this was it.

We drove down to check out Grace Venice. The pumpkins had already been delivered and the patch set up. They took all the tents and tables down but left the big pumpkins out on the pallet. Daryl was worried they might float away.....but the church is evacuation level D and the storm surge didn't make it all the way up to the church. The pumpkins were all still sitting in the patch!

I waited in the car while the boys wandered through all the buildings to check for damage. They probably lost an air conditioner on top of a roof and there were a TON of branches down all around and some standing water in the playground. But no water intrusion - not even where someone broke out a window in the corner of the Fellowship Hall to get shelter from the wind.

Between Grace and the beach is the Venice airport. There were a few small planes that had literally been flipped upside down, like this one.

 

Then we drove downtown to check out my office and First UMC Sarasota. As we were driving up 41 (with no working stoplights) we got to a spot with cell signal and suddenly all our phones went off with missed calls and text messages! We knew downtown had flooded but had heard the flooding only came up two blocks to Palm Avenue and missed the church completely. Being surrounded by all the high rises ended up protecting it from the wind too. My office is on the second floor above the preschool and all our windows were intact. The church had NO damage! This was the office building one block over from us. Their wind damage was almost exactly the same from Hurricane Ian.

We went 48 hours without power but were so thankful for the generator that we bought right before the storm. It worked beautifully to charge the refrigerator, microwave, one small TV, the wifi router and our phones. Damage reports came in from the district... much less for us this time and mostly concentrated in Manatee county. The other districts were much worse with their damage.