Wisconsin natives make it through Hurricane Milton, others not as fortunate

(WFRV) – Several Wisconsin families had the unfortunate luck of either moving to or visiting Florida amid a feverish hurricane season.

“It’s interesting to see, compare hurricane days to snow days,” Easton Kolz, a high schooler who moved from Suamico to Middleton, Florida, over the summer with his family, said. “We got off yesterday and today, and I assume we’re back tomorrow.”

His father, former Green Bay Metro Fire Department chief Dave Kolz, thought he had seen it all, but not after living through his third hurricane in three months, getting hit by Milton after Debbie and Helene.

“I would say that probably ranks as some of the most nervous four hours I had in my life,” Dave said. “We didn’t experience hardly any damage in our house at all. But you know, in the neighborhood, a lot of trees down, a lot of the fences are blown down. We’re very fortunate in the area where we’re at that they built these homes with these new codes. I know there’s a lot of people way worse off than we are.”

Easton says that his travels have taken him through blizzards snowboarding out west and to fierce storms in Tennessee, but the hurricane was unlike anything else he has encountered.

“Compared to what I’ve seen in Green Bay, regular storms, blizzards and out west and in Tennessee it’s definitely up in the highest,” he said. “Once the 82, 85 miles per hour wind gusts hit the whole house kind of shakes, and it’s like ‘it’s going to happen now.’”

For Justin Berken, originally from De Pere, he had to use all his might to keep the front door from blowing open.

“It sounds like an airplane over the house,” he said. “We were holding our front door shut, trying to keep it from blowing in. because if you lose pressure with any of the doors or windows breaking, we weren’t concerned about the windows breaking because of the shutters, but if you lose the front door you lose the roof. We were probably holding the front door shut for probably about an hour.”

Berken says that the damage isn’t significant in his neighborhood beyond a few downed trees and power lines.

“The community, the neighborhood that I lived in, we’re all working closely together, trying to help each other out,” Berken said. “We’re thankful we didn’t have major damage in the neighborhood that I’m in.”

Just down the road, Berken says a trailer park was reduced to ashes after a fire broke out.

“Outside of our neighborhood here is a whole different story,” he said. “There’s a trailer house community that had a devastating fire. It wiped out the entire trailer house community. Just glowing balls of fire in the distant black sky last night. Transformers going off and fires just everywhere.”

Sally Bork is from Sheboygan and got stuck in Florida visiting family. She grew up in Florida and has lived through several hurricanes, but this was the first in which the eye of the storm passed over her.

“When the wind was, the bands of the hurricane were coming through, it was like you could hear things cracking or crashing out front and you’re like, ‘ok, what was that?’” she said. “For sure it was the scariest because it was a direct hit. Literally, the eye went over the house.”

Bork did go outside during the passing of the eye to inspect the damage but ran right back inside when the back half of the storm approached.

“We were able to go outside of the house, there was no wind and it wasn’t even raining. And it was like that for at least half an hour,” she said. “But that’s what makes it dangerous, people think it’s done. As soon as we felt a breeze we went right back into the house, and the back half of the storm was definitely stronger than the first half. It just howled and howled for hours and hours.”

Bork says that Milton only added to the cleanup communities are facing after Helene.

“We’re very lucky, pretty much everybody on our street is okay. Lots of branches down but not on houses,” Bork said. “Just more tree branches that never got cleaned up. So we’re very far behind as a city and county getting cleaned up after Helene even, much less adding to the mess.”

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