For some riding out Milton along Florida’s west coast, ‘the alternatives weren’t too inviting’

Isla del Sol, Florida (CNN) — With the rain already slicing diagonals into the water off this transformed mangrove island in St. Petersburg, Vivienne Marran stood firm in her choice.

“We can ride it out,” she told CNN less than 20 hours before Hurricane Milton was due to smash in from the Gulf of Mexico not too far from here down Florida’s western shore.

“The alternatives weren’t too inviting, you know?” Marran explained Wednesday morning from the condo complex just off Tampa Bay where two weeks ago she rode out Hurricane Helene as it left 20 Floridians dead, countless others scrambling for shelter and a vast trail of debris Milton now threatened to use as a missile depot.

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“I mean, they tell us we’ve only got to go 20 miles” inland, she said. “But because of the last storm, there’s nowhere to go, really. I mean, I guess they’ve got evacuation places, but we’ve been through a lot of these, and it’s a concrete building, and I just feel safer here than elsewhere.”

Nearly 7.3 million Floridians live in 15 counties with mandatory evacuation orders. But even as officials kept begging people to leave coastal areas – “You need to help us by evacuating,” Tampa Fire Rescue’s chief pleaded Wednesday morning, adding, “I’ve never seen anything of this magnitude” – a subset of residents across Florida’s western edge were staying put.

Some of their neighbors already had left, packing bridges and highways to get away from storm surge zones forecast to flood up to 15 feet. But these holdouts and others had weighed factors – from the availability of gas and the cost and relative safety of inland hotels to the headache of getting back to possibly-swamped properties – and opted against evacuation.

There also was Milton’s uncertain track, with forecasters warning the major hurricane could wobble seemingly without warning, shifting its landfall target and thus its path across the Peninsula.

“I can’t tell you how many times that people have left here for previous storms and ended up in it,” Marran said.

For others, another evacuation two weeks after Helene – and deep into the 2024 hurricane season – simply was too much.

“It’s, like, PTSD,” said Holly Speckhart, who planned to weather Milton with Marran in their five-story building while watching Tampa Bay Rays baseball, sipping a Modelo, resting on inflatable mattresses in an interior hallway and, if needed, escaping the worst in an interior stairwell.

“All my friends are mad at me from Ohio,” added Speckhart, a Cincinnati native. “They keep calling me, saying, ‘You’re gonna die.’ And then you got (Tampa Mayor) Jane Castor saying, ‘If you don’t get out, you’re gonna die.’

“But … if Tampa would get it, I mean, you figure, what are they gonna be, 12 to 15 feet? I mean, that could be two stories,” the fourth-floor-dweller said of the potential surge. Their building’s top floors are much higher than that, she went on, and some units have hurricane shutters and windows.

“My biggest thing is: I don’t want to leave,” Speckhart concluded. “I just see what happens in a week. You know, you got mold, you got damage. I figure I can be here.”

Losing a pylon ‘scares me the most’

Some 100 miles south on Sanibel Island – devastated by 2022’s Hurricane Ian – Bridgit Stone-Budd also didn’t want to abandon her property and so planned to ride out Milton in the home on raised supports, she told CNN.

“I think the most important thing is we know we won’t be able to get back,” she said Wednesday morning. “That’s the No. 1 reason.”

Indeed, the city of Sanibel issued an evacuation order, with those who stay subject to a 24-hour curfew.

Also part of Stone-Budd’s calculus: Her house did not flood in prior hurricanes, she said, though she allowed that was no guarantee of safety.

“If we were to lose a pylon and the house wasn’t sturdy,” she said, “that scares me the most.”

Elsewhere along Florida’s west coast, neighborhoods had gone quiet by midday Wednesday as inland shelters filled up, barrier island bridges shut down and tornadoes from then-Category 4 Milton began spinning up on land.

“It was ghost town when we just left” Anna Maria Island, said Holmes Beach Police Chief William Tokajer, who the prior day had advised anyone opting to ride out the monster storm on the barrier island to “write your name and Social Security number on your leg.”

“The island has been secured,” he said late Wednesday morning. “We did a final pass-through, and I didn’t see anybody that was still there.”

“We’re off island until the storm passes, so there’ll be no fire, no police, no EMS, no first responders, nobody to answer the 911 calls for service that come out there,” Tokajer continued. “We’ve locked down the island, and we’ll return after the storm passes and check for safety before we let people out.”

Puzzles, books, card games and cold dinner

For her part, Marran earlier Wednesday had weighed what she considered the worst risks of facing down Milton on Isla del Sol, some 30 miles north of Holmes Beach via the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

“We’ll be OK from the surge,” concluded the native Londoner, who lives on the second story and can access higher floors. “The wind is a problem. I’m worried about the wind, but you know, … we have a plan” to get to the condo tower’s interior spaces.

As for the likelihood of losing power, “we’ve got lots of candles,” said Marran, who leads the homeowners association here. “Hopefully keep the iPads and the iPhones charged then, you know, I’ve got some puzzles. We’ve got books. I do play cards,” particularly the game Hand and Foot, using up to six decks – with jokers.

She, Speckhart and a few others also had plenty of food to cook, including some left by neighbors who’d evacuated, and “stuff that we can eat cold for a couple of days,” Marran said.

And, of course, the Isla del Sol residents who planned to endure Milton’s fury in top-risk Zone A – against all official advice – had each other.

“Once you lose the television,” she said, “you’ve just got to talk.”

CNN’s Mary Gilbert, Rebekah Riess, Andy Rose and John Berman contributed to this report.

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