Some Florida residents breathe sigh of relief as they return home: ‘We were very nervous’

After Hurricane Milton came ashore on Florida ’s Gulf coast, Carla Simionescu was reassuring relieved relatives on Thursday morning on the phone while she took photos of the tree branches, rocks, bits of wood and other debris littering the front yard and gravel driveway of her Sarasota house.

The 46-year-old waitress lives a mere six miles (10km) from the seaside community of Siesta Key, where the storm made landfall at around 8.30pm on Wednesday evening.

Simionescu ignored evacuation orders, covered her windows with planks of plywood and rode out the hurricane with her 68-year-old mother and two young daughters.

“We were very nervous because it was a big storm, but we had a plan B and we were ready,” shrugged the Uruguayan immigrant, who has seen her fair share of extreme weather episodes since moving to Florida in 1997.

Related: At least four killed as Florida begins to assess Hurricane Milton destruction

Compared to a 2005 hurricane in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Hollywood that toppled a construction crane on to a nearby service station and lifted one vehicle atop another, she intimated that Milton was no big deal.

“Some of my relatives in Miami were driving me crazy, telling me we were going to die if we didn’t get out of here,” said Simionescu. “But I knew nobody was going to die. We are Floridians, we are strong.”

Unfortunately, tornadoes that sprang up in Milton’s wake have killed at least four people in St Lucie county and another two in St Petersburg.

Still, thousands of Sarasota residents were breathing a sigh of relief as they returned to their homes this morning to survey the damage inflicted by the category 3 hurricane.

An estimated 100,000 people in the city were left without power, and fallen trees rendered many streets in Simionescu’s neighborhood, which sits on the shores of Sarasota Bay, impassable.

In comparison to St Petersburg 70 miles to the north, where 17in of rain fell on the city and the roof of the Tampa Bay Rays’ Tropicana Field domed stadium was shredded by 120mph (195km/h) wind gusts, Sarasota fared reasonably well.

Half a dozen public schools were earmarked as shelters by its county government, and the presence of generators and wifi connections at those sites lessened the inconvenience and anxieties felt by residents who decided to abandon their dwellings.

In the coastal city’s historic downtown, street signs stood askew, billboards had been stripped empty, and a 35ft-long unmoored sailboat named Angel’s Wings was leaning on its starboard side along Sarasota’s Bayfront Drive.

Members of the congregation of the Episcopalian Church of the Redeemer were into their fourth hour of collecting uprooted trees and other refuse strewn across the house of worships lawns.

Personal trainer Chris Miller remained in his downtown apartment throughout Hurricanes Helene and Milton and said they were not all that comparable.

“Helene was more storm surge,” noted the 54-year-old Minnesota native, adding that water came right up to the front door of the church sanctuary when Helene raced past Sarasota on the afternoon of 26 September. “Milton was more about wind.”

Miller moved to Florida nine years ago and has no intention of leaving Florida in the wake of the back-to-back hurricanes. But he recently made a conscious decision to reduce his exposure to the elements in an era of rapid climate change.

After initially living on the upmarket barrier island of Longboat Key that sits directly west of Sarasota, Miller moved to the mainland in 2022.

“Weather plays a big factor, not so much about living in Florida as to where in Florida,” he said. “And being inland a couple of blocks from the water makes a big difference.”