Making landfall October 9 on Siesta Key with catastrophic force, Hurricane Milton was one of the strongest hurricanes on record. A month later, Pine View students and staff vividly recall their experiences.
For middle school social studies teacher Liz Ballard, the challenge was navigating an evacuation with four dogs in the back seat. The damage: a destroyed fence and a roof that needs replacement. Despite suffering wreckage from Hurricane Milton’s 120 mph winds, Ballard chooses to focus on the positives rather than linger on misfortune.
“Realistically, as awful as it all seemed at the beginning, it takes a few days to realize how much other people really lost and to really count our blessings. We didn’t lose any life, we’re not displaced from our home,” Ballard said.
Others, though, were not as “lucky.” Pine View freshman Marisa Colwell and her sister, Juliana, a Pine View senior, were forced to relocate from their house in Manasota Key after flooding damage ravaged drywall and left furniture unusable.
Marissa Colwell recalls inspecting the severity of the neighborhood conditions while finding a way around the flood, which blocked their typical passage to their home.
“We had to park on the road and hike around. They [Colwell’s neighbors] just had their walls out already from Helene. It was not good, it was just impact on impact,” she said.
Their house is still undergoing repairs; however, during the early stages of damage control, Colwell described how the community came together, bonded by the collective drive to help one another.
Colwell recounted how her godmother traveled across the country from Colorado, eager to be of help.
“She was making coffee for all the workers and brought supplies, relief supplies and everything. So yeah, she was amazing for us,” Marissa Colwell said.
Flooding proved to be a major by-product of Hurricane Milton, as sophomore Cole Reuter also has his fair share of horror stories.
“We had to drain, like, four feet of water from our storage area, and that took forever. It was so much water; at first we had to do it manually,” Reuter said.
Reuter’s home had already been secured in preparation for Hurricane Helene, which had left its damage merely 13 days earlier. However, there were still difficult decisions for him to make. It came down to deciding which documents had priority for elevated surfaces, which items were not as important.
“We did throw away a lot of belongings, like a dumpster’s worth of keepsakes. Yeah, it was sad. Furniture, baby clothes, ski clothes, a lot of clothes,” Reuter said.
Reuter and his family initially evacuated to their friend’s home in Coral Cove. However, it was at that house where the likeliness of 10-15 foot surge became certain. In an effort to avoid being stranded in severe flooding, Reuter, his family, and their friends from Coral Cove packed into three cars and made a second evacuation to Laurel Oaks, staying at a residence where their safety was more certain.
In the end, according to Ballard, one positive outcome of Hurricane Milton was the sense of community in “this magical place we call Sarasota.” Neighbors, many of whom Ballard had not spoken to since COVID, came knocking on her door, ready to offer themselves up as extra hands.
That being said, Florida has had enough hurricanes and enough damage this tropical storm season. So, when predictions of Tropical Storm Rafael making landfall in the United States in early November, Ballard had only two words for it: “Go away!”