She lost her car to Helene. Could she get a rental to escape Milton?

ST. PETERSBURG — Vicki Donohue stood in the car rental line, her arms wrapped so tightly around her thin body that it almost looked as though she were flexing.

When she reached the front of the queue and an attendant asked for her insurance card, Donohue, 67, trembled.

“I don’t have it because my whole house is gone,” she said, dabbing her eyes with a crumpled up tissue. “My car is gone, too. That’s why I’m here.”

In the days after Hurricane Helene sent walls of saltwater barreling through coastal homes on Sept. 26, hundreds, if not thousands, of people who had lost cars to the storm were inundating Tampa Bay rental agencies with requests for loaner vehicles.

Now, there was a heated urgency. A new storm, Hurricane Milton, was tracking toward Tampa Bay. By Monday it had strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of more than 175 mph — a figure so jarring, it brought a local meteorologist to tears live on air. People needed vehicles to escape.

“I’m going to Atlanta to stay with my son,” Donohue told the attendant at the counter. “I just need a car. Please, I just need a car.”

Just 12 days earlier, Donohue had waited in her home as water rose first to her knees, then to her waist, and soon to past her shoulders. In the dark, she stood on her tiptoes, her legs cramping as she and her youngest son, who she lives with, took turns sitting on the kitchen counter, just big enough for one at a time.

Though she had ridden out past storms from the Shore Acres rental — because it was comfortable, and convenient, and leaving cost money — Helene was unlike anything she’d experienced before.

As her belongings bobbed around her, furniture ramming against her, bruising her arms and legs, regret flooded in.

“I’m going to drown,” she thought to herself, trying not to hyperventilate. “This is it. I’m going to drown.”

When being inside became too dangerous and they feared the house might collapse or catch fire, Donohue and her son decided to swim. Around 1:30 a.m., they found a kayak floating nearby. With a broken paddle, they made their way to safety.

“It’s the most scared I’ve ever been,” Donohue said. “I can’t live through that again.”

Watching the forecast the past few days, Donohue said, has meant reliving a trauma — “sheer panic,” she said. Just watching a meteorologist chart the path of the oncoming storm this morning brought nausea so severe she vomited her breakfast.

And so, around 12:30 p.m., she made her way to the Enterprise Rental shop on 34th Street North, where others like her were crowded into a little room, desperately waiting for their own means to escape.

“It’s been crazy these past few days,” an attendant told Donohue. “Our supply is short because so many people need cars.”

Donohue took a deep breath in, her hands shaking as she ran them through her shoulder-length hair. She pictured her neighborhood, still strewn with debris — “a war zone” — and felt another wave of nausea hit.

Then the attendant handed her a key.

Times staff writer Max Chesnes contributed to this story.

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