TAMPA, Fla. -- Like a new kid in town, Beverly Giffords walked across the parking lot toward Largo High School anxious about who she’d meet inside and what it would be like.

The 73-year-old retiree carried her blanket, some photos she’d grabbed from her trailer at Encore Vacation Village and the windshield sunshade from her car, so she’d have something to lie on.

“You want to pack everything,” she said, “but you don’t want to inconvenience everyone else.”

Inside, 2,700 people hid from Hurricane Milton. They ate meals in the school’s cafeteria. Dogs were kept in the boys’ locker room, cats in the girls’.

Giffords was shown to a classroom where around 30 women who’d also come alone were staying. She felt better as they shared snacks and stories about their kids, grandkids and great-grandkids.

“We laughed,” she said. “You put that many elderly ladies in a room thinking they may go home and have nothing, and you start to find the humor in everything. We all took care of each other.”

The storm got worse and the lights flickered out. Giffords went to sleep, unsure what she’d have to go home to.

She woke around 3 or 4 a.m. to a commotion.

Giffords had not noticed the small, younger woman who’d quietly come in earlier that night. No one seemed to know her personally.

“We thought she’d had an accident in her sleep, so we were grabbing towels and wet wipes, you know, everything we could do to help her,” she said. “We didn’t know she was pregnant.”

Word spread around the room that the woman was in labor — that the baby was coming months early.

“All those grands and great-grands — we were in action,” Giffords said. They gathered flashlights and battery-powered lanterns to light up the woman’s dark corner. They handed over dry blankets, stacked up to give the woman privacy and build up more cushion for the delivery.

They alerted police officers, who alerted firefighter paramedics. Then the women moved back and gave them space to work.

“We tried to make it a calm environment,” she said, “It’s almost like giving birth yourself, you know, because you care so much.”

How much time went by, she couldn’t say, but she prayed. “What if something was wrong, and this woman needed the hospital, or she needed something that the doctors in this state weren’t allowed to give her?”

Eventually, she heard a firefighter say calmly, “I have the baby.”

“The room was completely silent, with all of us holding our breath,” she said, “waiting to see if it was OK.”

The baby let out a soft cry. The room broke out in applause.

Giffords, who’d lost her own grown son a few years earlier, cried, too.

First responders had at points that night been forced off the streets of Pinellas County, unable to respond to calls for help due to flooding and downed trees. Eventually, though, an ambulance took the woman and baby away.

“Everyone stayed awake the rest of the night,” Giffords said. “Just talking about what a miracle it was.”

Some of the women exchanged numbers before they left the next day, thinking they might get together. Giffords’ house was fine.

She thought about the mother and baby every day, she said, wondering if they got what they needed that night, and had a place to go back to after the storm.

A week later, as the damage was still being assessed, Largo Fire Rescue released the simplest of updates:

“On Wednesday evening Oct. 9th, while stationed at the Largo High School hurricane shelter, our Largo firefighters successfully delivered a baby boy! Both mom and baby did well during delivery and were transported and treated at a local hospital.”

The firefighters, thanked for their “quick actions and attentive care,“ were listed as Lt. Brian Ammons, firefighter paramedic Daniel Young, firefighter paramedic Kyle Petsch, firefighter EMT Kenneth Daignault and firefighter EMT Andres Osorio.

Giffords accepts that’s likely as much closure as she’ll ever get about the mom and baby.

She wants the firefighters to know that they are heroes and the mother to understand that there’s a whole room full of women who care about her. As for herself, she feels, maybe, a little less worried about the uncertainty around Florida’s storms. “Life goes on.”

©2024 Tampa Bay Times. Visit at tampabay.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.