Less than two weeks ago, Val Stunja was frantically stacking furniture and belongings on her kitchen countertop. Hurricane Helene was bearing down on the west coast of Florida, and she was preparing her first-floor condominium in St. Petersburg, a Tampa Bay city that sits on a barrier island just a few hundred feet from the Gulf of Mexico.
Stunja, who works as an airline dispatcher, rode out the storm with a friend on the second floor and watched in horror as the storm surge inundated the streets around her. A wall of water several feet deep destroyed almost everything she owns; outside, it pushed cars and boats around like toys. Stunja thought she could save her own vehicle by parking it on higher ground a few miles inland, but the storm surge flooded it as well.
Crews had only just begun the arduous task of clearing shattered homes, ruined cars, and unfathomable amounts of debris from the neighborhoods around Stunja’s condo when she started to hear about another major storm: Milton, a tropical storm that formed in the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend and grew with stunning ferocity into a Category 5 hurricane over the course of less than a day on Monday. Stunja was already headed toward a friend’s home in Sarasota, an hour south of Tampa, when she learned that the storm was headed right for her. She turned around and tried to fly to her hometown in Texas. When that failed, she got into a car loaned by her insurance company on Monday afternoon and made for her son’s house in Jacksonville, spending hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic headed north and east.
“I can’t think straight,” she said. “I’m very confused. I haven’t even filed a claim yet on my house.”
Stunja is among hundreds of thousands of Floridians staring down a direct hit from a second major hurricane — even before they’ve come anywhere close to reckoning with the damage from Hurricane Helene. The quick turnaround has given Florida residents little time to find, let alone regain, their footing. The unfinished cleanup of the mess Helene created could compound the devastation to come from Hurricane Milton, and the one-two punch could have a devastating impact on the state’s ability to recover.
After Milton exploded in intensity, becoming a worst-case Category 5 hurricane within 24 hours, its wind speed surged to nearly 180 mph. Meteorologists attribute the rapid intensification to record-hot sea surface temperatures made 400 to 800 times more likely due to climate change. Forecasters say Hurricane Milton could lash the Florida Panhandle with storm surges reaching 12 feet high and bring as much as 15 inches of rain, potentially creating flash floods. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis had declared a state of emergency for more than 50 counties as of Monday, and several were under evacuation orders — including many told just 14 days ago to evacuate ahead of Helene.
Wreckage from Hurricane Helene remains strewn across streets in Clearwater, Florida, in the days preceding Hurricane Milton. Ayurella Horn-Muller / Grist
“A lot of the damage that occurred with Helene is going to get worse,” said Carlos Martin, director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Wreckage from Helene could be whipped into the air by Hurricane Milton. In the Tampa Bay area, more than 300 vehicles carted broken furniture and other trash to a landfill on Sunday, while lifeguards removed chairs and other items from beaches. Sarasota County, just south of Tampa, said it was focusing “all efforts on removing Hurricane Helene debris” in the most vulnerable places, and the county lifted landfill fees for people living in unincorporated areas.
Progress has been exceedingly slow, however; the mayor of Clearwater, a city just north of St. Petersburg, said on Sunday that only 5 percent of the debris on Clearwater Beach had been cleared. Some residents don’t think the city and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are doing enough to clear away the wreckage ahead of the impending storm.
“This is going to all be weapons,” Clearwater resident Monika Spaldo said, referring to the waterlogged furniture and trash surrounding her. “The debris from all of this is going to hit windows, roofs, cars, people. … It’s going to fly and destroy everything.”
Spaldo is a property manager at Coconut Grove, a beachside condominium complex that was damaged by storm surge from Hurricane Helene. In the days following the storm, she felt so sick from exposure to dirty floodwaters and refuse that she almost went to the hospital. With Hurricane Milton rapidly approaching, she is terrified by all the debris lining the streets — and what the storm to come will mean for the town’s future.
“I don’t know how we’re ever going to recover,” she said. “Everything on the island is going to be destroyed.”
Meanwhile, experts are concerned that the two disasters striking in quick succession will complicate the essential process of filing insurance claims in order to make victims whole for the financial damage they’ve suffered. Those who experienced losses during Helene are supposed to document them before evacuating ahead of Milton, so that claims adjusters can differentiate the damage caused by the two events. Lisa Miller, a former deputy insurance commissioner for Florida, called the situation “unparalleled.”
“All bets are off,” she added.
For many victims, filing insurance claims so quickly could well be impossible, given the rapid sequence of events and the urgency of current evacuation orders. In Sarasota County on Monday, residents were urged to leave immediately. “If you wait, you will get stuck in traffic,” a government website warned.
Some people, like Stunja, may head to relatives’ homes in safer areas. But because Helene reached up to 500 miles inland in some parts of Florida, they may have to travel much farther than that to find suitable accommodations. Others may need to take shelter in schools or athletic facilities, which are listed in a county-by-county directory compiled by the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency often steps in to run shelters during major emergencies, but its capacity may be limited by a major staffing shortage as it continues to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Helene — along with fires, flooding, landslides, and tornadoes in several other states.
In the longer term, the storms may exacerbate Florida’s insurance crisis. “People’s premiums are going to go through the roof,” said Martin of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The state is already the most expensive in the country for home insurance, according to a 2024 report by Insurify, a digital insurance agent. Helene and Milton could increase the cost of housing in other ways as well. Buildings that were damaged during Helene could become unrecoverable after Milton, making it harder for people to return.
Sara McTarnaghan, a principal research associate at the nonprofit policy research organization the Urban Institute, said Florida hasn’t even yet recovered from vulnerabilities in its housing stock that were created by storms that struck years ago, including Idalia, Ian, and Michael.
“Many parts of Florida have experienced multiple events over the past five to 10 years, which is the timeline for recovery and making repairs to existing housing,” she said. “Depending on the trajectory of Hurricane Milton it could be hitting a vulnerable housing stock, and we could be seeing more loss of units, more costly repairs.”
As Stunja prepares to ride out Hurricane Milton in Jacksonville, she still doesn’t know what she’s going to do after the storm passes. She’s just begun to work through her flood insurance claim with FEMA, but the surge from Milton could flood both floors of her condo building. If that happens, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to stay.
“If the second floor gets water on this one, the building’s probably a tear-down,” she said. “If that happens, I’ll go off-island. I love Florida, but I don’t need to be on the beach.”
Jake Bittle and Ayurella Horn-Muller contributed reporting to this story.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘I can’t think straight’: Still buried beneath Helene’s debris, Floridians brace for Milton on Oct 8, 2024.
