FLORIDA (WTAQ-WLUK) – Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday night as a Category 3 storm near Siesta Key, Florida. It comes less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene ravaged the region.
FOX 11 spoke with a few former Northeast Wisconsin residents now living in Florida. Some chose to evacuate, while others prepared to ride out the storm, hoping for the best.
“It definitely is scary, the wind is scary,” said Justin Berken. He’s originally from De Pere but now lives in Bradenton, Florida.
Residents are counting down the hours until Hurricane Milton unleashes its inevitable devastation on the western coast of Florida.
“I pulled up all my rugs, put everything up high. I filled the tub with water like they told us to do, sandbags, closed my sheds as much as I could, put plastic on all the doors with sandbags,” said Stephanie Norquist, who moved to Bradenton from Appleton just two months ago.
Her home is in the storm’s path, 15 miles north of Sarasota. She evacuated to Miami Tuesday night.
“I have a huge oak tree over my house, so I’m hoping that stays as an oak tree and doesn’t fall. I’m just hoping my windows are still there and everything is still in place,” Norquist said. “When people who have never evacuated in their entire lives are evacuating, it makes me a little nervous.”
Former Green Bay residents Tom and Lori Tansey now live north of Tampa in Chapel, Florida. They decided to escape the storm too, despite not being in an evacuation zone.
“We’re still in that wind circle so we have hurricane windows on our house, everything secured in the hurricane shutter. But it came down to why take the risk when we have a great friend who offered us to come and shelter on the other side of the peninsula? So we secured everything and we left,” Lori said.
Other Florida residents, like Berken, are hunkering down. He lives in Bradenton and isn’t in an evacuation zone. His newer home is built to withstand winds up to 150 miles per hour.
“It’s kind of similar to preparing for a blizzard in a way. You have your backup power, so we have a generator gasoline or propane. I have a power station on my table, so we can charge our devices and keep things going as needed off the generator. Food and water, we have a bunch food and snacks on the counter too,” Berken said.
“Locals who have lived and grew up here and never experienced the cold, they’ll say, “I’d rather live through a hurricane than a blizzard.’ Me, living through those blizzards, I’d rather live through a blizzard than a hurricane,” Berken added.
But after living in Florida for nine years, he’s learned that preparation is key.
“You have to remain calm. You make your plans, you go through with your plans and then you have backup plans.”
No matter where they’re at, these residents say their communities are strong and they will get through the storm and clean up together.
These former Wisconsinites tell us some of the hardest hit residents will be those who are still cleaning up from Hurricane Helene. They say leftover debris from that storm, and the potential for it to blow around, creates another threat factor for Hurricane Milton.
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