Can We PLEASE be Done with Hurricane Season 2024 Already?

Hurricane Debby on August 5th. Hurricane Helene on September 26th. Hurricane Milton on October 9th. Enough already! This hurricane season has been epic, and not in a good way. I thought you all might be interested in what Floridians on the gulf coast have been going through for the past five months as hurricane season delivered its wrath in spectacular fashion.

Hurricane Milton on 8 October as a Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico

You’ve heard me say it before – we moved down here to Florida, despite a number of negatives that we thought about carefully before making our final decision. One of those negatives was the long, hot, humid summers that are absolutely relentless and seem to go on forever. The other, which overlaps with the summer weather, was the prospect of hurricanes each year.

Hurricane season runs for six months from June 1st through November 30th. In reality, there is rarely anything serious that threatens Florida before August, and most of the activity runs occurs in September and October. Also, hurricane season coincides with the rainy season here, which runs from June through September. That’s a lot of weather stuff all bunched together in a 6-month period!

We have lived through four summers and hurricane seasons since we retired and moved down here to Lakewood Ranch in July of 2021. During the first three years, we experienced three tropical storms, and one major category 4 hurricane (Hurricane Ian). Not a bad run, although riding out Ian wasn’t my idea of fun. Then came the summer of 2024, which has broken all sorts of records.

First, the summer started out with the warmest May on record here in Sarasota, with 16 days above 90 degrees. Then, the hits kept on coming, with a three-month string of high temperatures in the low 90’s and heat indices in the low 100’s – thank God for the pool!! All that heat was accompanied by a 1,000-year deluge of rain from May through mid-October. The average yearly rainfall for Lakewood Ranch is a bit less than 40 inches of rain. But from June through mid-October, we got 91 inches of rain – that’s 7 ½ FEET of rain in a bit over 4 months!

Then came the hurricanes. The first was Hurricane Debby, which actually passed by us as a tropical storm in early August. Debby dumped 22 inches of rain on us over a 2-day period – like I said, epic! That was followed by Hurricane Helene, which was an absolutely huge storm that was actually far out in the gulf when it passed by us, but that still resulted in tropical force winds for us and a devastating storm surge for our local Sarasota beaches and barrier islands, one of the largest ever seen in the area.

Then came Hurricane Milton. In another first, Milton started as John in the Pacific Ocean and crossed over Mexico into the Gulf where it became Milton and grew from a tropical storm into a Category 5 hurricane in just over 24 hours. And it soon started bearing down on our hometown of Sarasota. It turns out that Laurie and I had a long-planned trip to Minnesota to visit my brother and his family, and our flight was scheduled to depart the day before Milton hit. So, we decided to proceed with our vacation after we hurricane-prepped our house. Our flight ended up being one of the last ones out of Sarasota airport, an hour before it closed for the hurricane.

We were obviously concerned about our home and our friends in Lakewood Ranch but took advantage of the already planned vacation to avoid riding out what ended up being a Category 3 hurricane at home.  Our house is about 11 miles inland from the coast, and 16 miles from where Milton made landfall just south of Siesta Key. The hurricane then moved in a direct line to Lakewood Ranch, with the eye passing over our home midway through the hurricane. Our neighbors, most of whom rode out the storm, all said it was a scary thing to go through, but amazingly we had little serious damage to our homes and properties. Mostly torn lanai screens, missing roof tiles, and downed trees, bushes, and fences – it could have been so much worse.

I think we need a new lanai screen!

Roof damage from Milton - Tropicana Field where the Tampa Bay Rays play baseball

Downtown Sarasota after Milton blew through

Flooding in St Armand’s Circle in Sarasota

Downed trees from Milton – Main Street Lakewood Ranch

It turns out that Lakewood Ranch is far enough inland and away from the gulf and rivers that we are not classified as a flood zone, which was one of the reasons we chose to settle down here. Many people don’t know this, but most of the destruction that comes from hurricanes comes from the water (the initial storm surge caused by the winds) as well as flooding rainfall that causes rivers and lakes to overflow, and not the high winds. So, the saying always goes, “Run from the water, hide from the wind”. In fact, they encourage you not to evacuate if you don’t have to. If you live in a newer home built to survive a Category 5 hurricane (which is code for all new homes built in Florida), then it’s actually safest to shelter in place after you have put up your hurricane shutters and cleared your property of any outdoor furniture that might turn into flying projectiles during a hurricane.

Until Milton, Laurie and I had always planned on staying put and riding out any hurricane that was a Category 3 or below. For Category 4 or 5 hurricanes that might hit us directly or come close to us, we planned on heading out of town (actually, out of state!) and avoiding the terrifying prospect of experiencing that level of wind, even though we would be safe, and our home would withstand the storm.

After Milton, and our experience with Ian, we have decided to take a different approach to our hurricane planning. First, preparing for a hurricane takes a lot of time and isn’t easy. Hurricane shutters are a pain to install, and make the house dark and dreary since no light gets in. We did invest in a hurricane screen for our covered lanai, which allows us to store all of our lanai furniture in the covered section. And as an added plus, you can see through the screen when it’s down, so we do get light coming in through the screen. But because the hurricane shutters are such a pain to install and take down, everyone waits until the last minute to put them up, just in case the hurricane changes its track and you don’t need them. So, we are going to install permanent hurricane shutters on all of our windows that can be closed in minutes instead of hours. That means we can close up the house and make the decision to leave or stay days earlier than we otherwise would.

We have also decided that we aren’t interested in riding out violent hurricanes if we don’t have to, and that includes Category 3 hurricanes. Our plan going forward is to go take a short, unplanned vacation whenever it looks like our area is going to take a direct or close hit from a Cat 3 or higher hurricane; we’ll probably still stay for anything less than that. It will reduce the stress and regardless, why put yourself through that if you don’t need to?!

Now that we have taken a direct hit from a Category 3 hurricane and lived to tell about it (with little damage to our property), we are hoping we have checked the box for a few years so we don’t have to experience another one in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, it is 70 degrees at 1:30 pm on a Thursday afternoon here in Sarasota as I write this – fall has arrived and hopefully there is no turning back. Up next is six months of superb weather – warm (but not hot!) days in the 70’s and low 80’s, little to no rain, and best yet, low humidity and lots of sunshine! Now’s the time to come visit us – you all have an open invitation so start making your plans now!