As Lee White stood at the end of his driveway on Manasota Key on Friday, he was wedged between the destruction.
A road on the left had been washed away. To the right, yards of sand piled high on the rest of a street, littered with flooded cars, broken cobblestones and twisted wrought-iron fences. But when he looked straight ahead, he saw a beautifully flat Gulf of Mexico through his neighbor’s hollowed-out garage.
He, like everyone else he could think of on this part of Florida’s Gulf Coast, had been evacuated when the forecast warned of the force of Hurricane Milton. While White’s home survived largely unscathed, the storm tore apart many others. Hurricane Helene had brought this neighborhood to its knees two weeks earlier, leaving Milton cold.