Hurricane Michael: 6 Years Later

Last year, when I was rehabbing from ACL reconstruction, I picked up indoor cycling. I have always loved cycling, but after a few close calls with vehicles and a wreck at 30 mph, I couldn’t bring myself to ride the roads again. A bike on a trainer was the perfect solution and allowed me to continue to accelerate my rehabilitation. It also has the added benefit of allowing me to watch all of the new shows on streaming while I cycle.

After a long break, I have recently picked it up again and starting watching For All Mankind on Apple TV+. I wasn’t entirely ready for the end of season one. Without spoiling too much, there’s a period of the show where two astronauts were isolated from the world, with no comms, and uncertain about their future and everyone they love.

Today, our friends in the southern part of the state are going to wake up in a different world than the one they went to sleep in. Hurricane Milton has slammed into the western part of the Florida peninsula and will likely leave billions of dollars in damage and hundreds of lives lost. I know all too well about this story.

Six years ago today, Hurricane Michael made landfall in the panhandle of Florida. It’s a day that I remember as if it were yesterday.

Tropical systems are interesting in Florida. We have three categories for these storms.

• Tropical Depression

• Tropical Storm

• Hurricane

Hurricanes are then graded on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most violent, based on their wind speeds. I often joke that Florida is built for this, and it truly is. Anything below a hurricane is a blip on most people’s news feeds. Even category 1 and 2 hurricanes cause little concern and are seen as more of an inconvenience than a risk. Hurricanes with a category of 3 or high are called “major hurricanes” and do start to see a ramp in intensity.

Hurricane Michael was slated to be, at worst, a category 2 hurricane at landfall. It had spawned off of the Yucatan Peninsula and had caused little cause for concern. We boarded the windows, but felt pretty confident that it would cause a couple of days of power outages and we would be back to relatively normal life.

On October 9, 2018, my wife Anna left to start her overnight shift at the hospital as part of the onsite team for the storm and I had a couple of friends who were in less secure housing come over to start out Hurricane party. It was never a consideration to evacuate. We had all ridden out storms like this before and we were going to play video games until the power went out, board games until we were tired, and see what food we could track down the next day.

On October 10, we work up to news that Michael had strengthened overnight and was likely to be a category 3 or 4 when it hit.

They were wrong.

Hurricane Michael hit as a category 5 and is the strongest hurricane to ever hit the Florida Panhandle.

That day was emotionally exhausting. We awoke to find out that we probably should’ve evacuated, but it was too late. The morning was met with calls to everyone we knew and making sure they felt confident in their arrangements and making last minute adjustments. Windows were boarded, doors covered, sandbags place, and we all waited and watched the news as we prepared for the inevitable.

At 10am, the rain and wind started. We watched out the window as the hilarity of trash cans rolling down that were unsecured began rolling down the street. Occasionally, a few lawn decorations would be included in the fly bys.

At noon, the power went out. At this point we were still expecting a low category 4 at worst. We turned on the radio and began to listen to hurricane tracking updates via the news. The weather was getting worse by the minute as we approached white out conditions due to the rain and wind.

At 12:30pm we heard that the eye wall had made landfall at Tyndall AFB. This was west of where it was projected and put use firmly within the track of the eye wall. The radio commentators said that we would probably be done with the storm by 2 or 3pm.

At this point, we had migrated into the laundry room of my house. The windowless room had enough room for the three of us to sit if we kept our knees to our chest. Me and my friend Joe planted our entire body weight into the doors on either side as the changes in pressure and the winds attempted to blow them open.

Wind began ripping through the house around the small gaps in the doors and windows. The storm was just climbing in intensity. We were completely disconnected from the world and had to just wait. Time stood still, but we waiting as we heard the house become battered by the storm.

Hiding in that room, we could hear glass breaking as windows shattered. We could hear water falling on the ground as it leaked through the sides of the house into the rafters. We could hear items from other houses slamming against the house. With no other options, we waited and hoped that we would get a chance to see what existed after the storm.

Around 4pm that day the storm stopped, almost suddenly. We left the house to see the new world. The skyline had changed. Thousands of pine trees were suddenly gone. Mailboxes had been ripped from the ground and littered the neighborhood. Shingles, vinyl siding, and other debris were everywhere. A dumpster had been flipped over like an empty soda can in construction in the back of the neighborhood. We walked to the front of the neighborhood, our only point of entry or exit, to see our options for leaving.

Hundreds of pine trees were downed on the roads making it impossible to traverse. I received a call from my sister to ask how we were. When I told her we were outside looking at the damage she said six words that are forever engrained in my mind.

“Get back inside, it’s not over.”

We didn’t know it, but we were outside in the eye of the hurricane. The center of a hurricane is the eye of the storm. The eye is known for it’s peaceful weather in the middle of the fury of mother nature. We weren’t supposed to catch the eye, so we thought we were in the clear. But it was temporary. About the time I hung up the phone, a massive wind gust knocked me down. We sprinted back to the laundry room and rode out another hour or so of the storm.

After the second wave of the storm, we sat there. No power. No water. No internet. No phone service.

Miraculously I was able to receive two calls before bed, one from my sister that said she had spoke to my parents and they were ok. The other, only through borrowed phones, from my wife that she had survived the storm.

And then silence.

No phone calls. No radio. No anything. Not even birds chirping.

The silence was followed by darkness. Not the darkness that you normally think of at night, but a suffocating blanket of darkness. You don’t realize how much light pollution exists until miles of infrastructure are dark. Lit only by the moon and the stars, we sat there and waited.

We waited for a chance to leave. A chance to hug the ones we loved. A chance to find out if our friends and family members even survived. Disconnected from the outside world as we frantically attempted to make phone calls and learn more. The entire city impossible to travel, covered in trees, light poles, and parts of buildings.

In four days, a mild disturbance became the most powerful storm to ever hit our area. In 24 hours it went from few days of inconvenience to a rebuilding effort that still isn’t done.

So as I watched two fictional astronauts drift into space, isolated from the world, and Hurricane Milton (ironically the replacement name for Michael) slam into Florida, I could only think back to that day. The day where I didn’t know if any of my friends and family would be there when the sun rose. The day I learned the true power of a category 5 hurricane.

The day I learned what loneliness, silence, and darkness really mean.