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Packing a Life Into a Suitcase: Facing Hurricane Milton

As Tampa braces for impact, I’m ready for the worst but hoping for the best

Gem Blackthorn
4 min readOct 9, 2024
Image from WFLA

This is a short one and it won’t be edited very well because I am writing it on the fly.

I live in Tampa Bay and we’re bracing ourselves for Hurricane Milton at a Category 5. I discussed being a lifelong Floridian when I wrote about Hurricane Helene just a couple of days ago.

My house is out of the evacuation and flood zone by just a couple of miles, but still very much in the path of the hurricane. Hurricane Helene was a “water storm” due to its storm surge, but Hurricane Milton is a wind storm.

There is still debris from Hurricane Helene in the Tampa Bay area and they’re about to become 155+ miles per hour projectiles. As I write this, there have been several tornados spotted ahead of the hurricane’s landfall.

The eye has finally moved a little south (sorry, Sarasota), but that’s a small relief when you see how massive this storm is.

Preparing for Hurricane Milton has been a surreal experience. In my last hurricane post, I wrote about the many reasons people might choose to ride out a storm. I will not repeat them here, but I will say that I was not able to evacuate myself this time around. I am…

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Gem Blackthorn
Gem Blackthorn

Written by Gem Blackthorn

📚 Marketing & Content Strategist 🌙 Occasional Poet

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