After Hurricane Milton, a feeling of ‘fight or flight’ along Pinellas beaches
On the southern tip of St. Pete Beach, among tilted palms and sand-sprayed picnic tables, a sheriff’s office car rolled slowly through a community at the beginning of recovery from the second hurricane to make landfall on Florida’s west coast in the last two weeks.
While the story of Hurricane Helene was written in close-call rescues, drownings and flooded buildings — the wreckage of which still lines hundreds of miles of Pinellas roads — that of Hurricane Milton was defined for many by a dizzying combination of relief and exhaustion on the back of immediate heartache.
The Tampa Bay region was spared the surge that forecasters said could have reached 15 feet. But just days after residents first returned to their homes to clean up debris from one deadly storm, Milton came as another hard blow.
“It’s almost like a fight or flight feeling,” said Kelcey Marsan, 28. “You don’t have time to sit and cry. You have to call FEMA, get the stuff out of your house. It’s a lot.”
