After Hurricane Helene left Dan Hadley and Diane deGrasse with no power or water at their home in Black Mountain, N.C., an old friend from church offered them her home in Venice, Fla. She was going to be away, but at least the couple could get a respite from the tough post-storm conditions.
Mr. Hadley, 87, drove 14 hours over two days to get to Venice. “We said, ‘Hey, let’s head to sunny Florida!” he said.
Then, Hurricane Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico.
“This dumb luck,” Mr. Hadley said by phone as rains and winds gusted outside.
The couple once again found themselves with no running water — local officials shut it off ahead of the storm — but they still had power late Wednesday afternoon. They had lifted books and other items off the floor, expecting a foot or two of storm surge, though Mr. Hadley said the latest forecast showing a slightly weaker storm had reassured him a bit.
Speaking from her second home in Cape Cod, Mass., Linda Underwood said she could not believe she had inadvertently put her friends in Milton’s path.
“I did it out of the goodness of my heart,” she said. “Now they’re sitting quite near the shores of Venice, Florida.”
The Venice house is in an evacuation zone, Mr. Hadley said — half a mile from the water — but “we just have no place to go.”
Many Floridians have ties to North Carolina. Terry Neal, who is retired, splits his time between Tampa, Fla., and Hendersonville, N.C. He was in North Carolina for Helene and his home there still has no power. He was anxiously waiting to see what Milton might do to his Tampa home.
“I lived in Florida for 24 years, and I’ve seen hurricanes come through before, but nothing like these past two weeks,” Mr. Neal said. “I just can’t believe it.”
His Tampa home is near a river. He said in an interview on Tuesday that he worried the house would flood and he might lose meaningful belongings, such as his pets’ ashes. Before he leaves each year for North Carolina, he said, “I say to them, ‘You’re protecting our home.’”
But mostly, Mr. Neal said, “I worry about the living” — his friends and neighbors in Tampa who might soon face conditions similar to the one his friends and neighbors in North Carolina are weathering.
Mr. Hadley said that when he retired to the Asheville, N.C., area, he considered it a climate haven.
“There was no way of anticipating that we’d get soaked with rain before Helene was even a storm,” he said.
Now, awaiting Milton, he and his wife have stocks of food, water and liquor, he said. Ms. deGrasse, he added, “has been making really quite excellent peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
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