Hurricane Milton evacuees return to barrier islands to pick up pieces

SARASOTA, Fla. — Less than 48 hours after Hurricane Milton made landfall near Siesta Key, many residents were returning to the barrier islands off Sarasota for the first time since evacuating earlier in the week.

Late Friday morning, cars flowed freely over the John Ringling Causeway leading from Sarasota onto St. Armands Key, a few hours after Sarasota Police re-opened the roads to the barrier islands. Just over the bridge, people were assessing damage in St. Armands Circle, a central dining and shopping area on the island.

Normally a pristine, bustling part of the island, sidewalks in St. Armands Circle remained covered in vegetation debris and random items, including a beekeepers’ hive boxes still swarming with bees. Outside the high-end women’s clothing store Foxy Lady, general manager Jodi Frauhiger, a 30-year Sarasota resident, was an hour and a half into taking stock of the damage.

“We’ve had some storms, and we’ve lost power for a week at a time and that kind of thing. But never two storms this intense back to back,” she said.

She, like many others, said she felt fortunate to come back to see that the area didn’t end up as devastated as it could have potentially been. Before landfall, Milton exploded into Category 5 strength, and that’s what many prepared for. At landfall, Milton had weakened into a Category 3 storm. Still, she had three feet of water that intruded into the store with Milton.

“When they say it’s gonna hit you right on, you think, ‘Oh my gosh. We’re gonna be devastated.’ I mean, this is bad, but it could have been way worse,” she said.

She estimated it would take up to a month to now reopen the business. Had Milton not crashed ashore a matter of days after Helene, she said they could have re-opened within a few weeks.

“Now, we have to do stuff that we’ve already done,” she said.

Much of the destruction from Lido Key to Anna Maria was caused by Hurricane Helene, not Milton, many residents said. But Milton put any progress on hold, adding to their stress and anxiety.

Largely the damage from Milton was from wind rather than destructive storm surge. Street after street after street for miles up and down the island looked nearly identical, the vast majority of it being the damage from Helene: couches, mattresses, fiberglass insulation, random debris and pieces of almost every type of furniture and home goods ruined by saltwater sat in jagged piles outside homes and on the curb.

Lido Key resident Chris Amstudz was fixing his white fence along Garfield Drive early Friday afternoon. He returned home for the first time Friday morning since the storm hit.

“We dodged a huge bullet,” he said.

With each storm that comes, Amstudz said the residents on the island are repeatedly warned about storm surge, but they hadn’t experienced anything significant before Helene. By the time Milton started churning in the Gulf and up the coast, everyone was scared. Neighbors who normally would have chosen not to evacuate did leave for Milton after seeing Helene’s surge, which turned his street into a “roaring river,” he said.

Farther south in Lido Key, Doris Donovan dragged her blue suitcase through the sand, the wheels leaving a trail on what used to be the ground floor of the building she’s lived in for four years. The beach just steps away was empty. The sea was calm. At several hotels and residential buildings on the south end of Lido Key, swimming pools were completely filled in with sand after Helene, leaving just railings and tops of the steps into the pool visible and the edges showing the depths.

Donovan stayed during Hurricane Helene but evacuated about 15 miles away for Milton. She was in a mandatory evacuation zone and was the last to leave her eighth-floor unit, about noon on Tuesday.

Donovan, originally from Puerto Rico, said she has experienced Category 3 hurricanes before and saw the destruction in Puerto Rico a few months after Category 5 Hurricane Maria in 2017. “My dream was always to live in front of the beach,” she said, after living for more than three decades in Seattle. When she made the decision to move about four years ago, her son had just gone off to college, and Donovan said it was time for her to finally make the move she had always wanted to make.

“The reason I picked Sarasota is because, as they said, hurricanes don’t come here,” she said, laughing. She planned to try to find a hotel for a few days before possibly going to stay with family in Orlando or Boston or Delaware.

Farther north on Longboat Key, an empty grass lot on the corner of Jungle Queen Way is where the town has dumped all of the ruined furniture debris so far collected from the main thoroughfare Gulf of Mexico Drive after Helene. A bike. A scooter. Couches. Dressers. Chairs. Doors. Mattresses. A stove. All were heaped on the corner of the grass lot at the end of Jungle Queen Way.

Alise Randolph, who lives down the road from the trash heap, said she was worried all of the pieces of random trash and debris would be catapulted around during Milton and end up on her roof. “But thank goodness, it didn’t,” she said.

The ruined household items they removed from Helene, though, did blow around their street. Their trash was in neighbors’ yards, and neighbors’ trash was in theirs.

She and her husband returned to their home about 10 a.m. Friday and found their roof damaged but no water damage, unlike with Helene. The three-foot water line inside her home from Helene was still visible. There’s more clean-up to do now with the second storm.

Randolph said contractors have given her “ridiculous estimates” and that realtors have started calling, offering her a third of what her home is worth.

“We know we can’t rebuild because they’re gouging … So we may sit on it for a bit until things get back to normal. You’ve got thousands of houses in the same situation,” Randolph said.

Randolph and her husband moved into the house on Longboat Key full time about a year ago, previously traveling back and forth from Washington, D.C.

“I love it here. I love the beach. I love everything. But it’s just, it’s a stressful situation because I see that it’s getting worse and worse every year with all this hurricanes and rising water level and temperature. I do believe in climate change. A lot of Floridians don’t, but I do,” she said.

To the north into Bradenton Beach, a bright yellow house on the corner of 12th Street and the main thoroughfare Gulf Drive South that was first damaged in Helene had been titled to its side, after the pillars underneath gave way during Milton, neighbor Betty Rogers said. Rogers came back onto the island from the Cortez area by boat a few days after Helene. She saw propane tanks and furniture in the bay on her way over.

At the end of the bridge that connects Bradenton Beach on the island with Cortez on the mainland, the Bradentrucky Grub Truck had been set up for hours, giving away free food to those who came by. Brandon Kelle, a resident of Bradenton and co-owner of the food truck, said he opened up at noon with enough hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, french fries and deli sandwiches for 500 to 600 people and was nearly out by about 3:30 p.m.

They started passing out food after Helene, took a break for Milton and picked back up again Friday, their first day back.

“They’re telling us their story. They really can’t believe what they’ve gone through and that people are out here trying to help out like this,” he said.

He rode out Milton in his first-floor apartment in Bradenton. The roof on his side of the building was torn off during Milton’s winds, he said. “We right now have a nice view of the sky,” he said.

“They won’t let me climb up there and put a tarp on it … so since I can’t do anything, they won’t let me do it, I gotta do something else,” he jokingly said, of running the food truck. “People are just so disheveled. They’re wanting to tell you their story. You’re trying to remember their story. You’re trying to remember these faces individually because they’ve come back to us multiple times now,” Kelle said.

(Staff photojournalist Carline Jean contributed to this report.)