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Isla del Sol, Florida
CNN
—

While the rain was already cutting diagonals into the water of this transformed mangrove island in Saint Petersburg, Vivienne Marran remained true to her choice.

“We can get out there,” she told CNN less than 20 hours before Hurricane Milton was set to slam into the Gulf of Mexico, not far from here along Florida’s western coast.

“The alternatives weren’t too inviting, you know?” Marran explained it Wednesday morning from the apartment complex near Tampa Bay where she left Hurricane Helene two weeks ago, which left 20 Florida residents dead, left scores of others scrambling for shelter and left a huge trail of debris now threatening Milton to be used as a missile depot.

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“I mean, they tell us we only have to go twenty miles inland,” she said. ‘But because of the last storm you can’t really go anywhere. I mean, I think they have evacuation sites, but we’ve been through a lot of them, and it’s a concrete building, and I just feel safer here than anywhere else.

Nearly 7.3 million Floridians live in 15 counties under mandatory evacuation orders. But even as officials continued to plead with people to leave coastal areas — “You have to help us by evacuating,” the Tampa Fire Rescue chief pleaded Wednesday morning, adding, “I’ve never seen anything of this magnitude” — a subset of residents throughout Florida’s western edge region remained standing.

Some of their neighbors had already left, packing bridges and highways to escape storm surge areas that were expected to flood up to five meters high. But these holdouts and others had weighed factors — from the availability of gasoline and the cost and relative safety of inland hotels to the headache of returning to potentially flooded properties — and opted for evacuation.

There was also Milton’s uncertain track, with forecasters warning that the major hurricane could wobble seemingly without warning, shifting the target of landfall and thus its path across the peninsula.

“I can’t tell you how many times people have left here because of previous storms and ended up in that,” Marran said.

For others, another evacuation two weeks after Helene – and deep into the 2024 hurricane season – was simply too much.

“It’s like PTSD,” said Holly Speckhart, who planned to beat Milton with Marran in their five-story building as they watched Tampa Bay Rays baseball, sipping a Modelo, resting on inflatable mattresses in a interior hallway and, if necessary, worst escape into an interior stairwell.

“All my friends from Ohio are mad at me,” added Speckhart, who is from Cincinnati. “They keep calling me and saying, ‘You’re dying.’ And then you have (Tampa Mayor) Jane Castor saying, ‘If you don’t get out, you’re going to die.’

“But…if Tampa got it, you mean, you’re like, what are they going to be, 10 to 15 feet? I mean, that could be two floors,” the fourth-floor resident said of the potential surge. The upper floors of their building are much taller, she continued, and some units have hurricane shutters and windows.

“My biggest thing is, I don’t want to leave,” Speckhart concluded. “I just see what happens in a week. You know, you have mold, you have damage. I think I can be here.”

About 100 miles south on Sanibel Island — devastated by Hurricane Ian in 2022 — Bridgit Stone-Budd also didn’t want to leave her property behind and so planned to ride Milton into the house on elevated supports, she told CNN.

“I think the most important thing is that we know we can’t come back,” she said Wednesday morning. “That’s reason number 1.”

The city of Sanibel has indeed issued an evacuation order, with a 24-hour curfew for those who remain.

Also part of Stone-Budd’s calculation: Her home has not flooded in previous hurricanes, she said, although she admitted that was no guarantee of safety.

“If we lose a pole and the house isn’t sturdy,” she said, “that’s when I’m most afraid.”

Elsewhere along Florida’s west coast, neighborhoods had gone quiet around noon Wednesday as inland shelters filled, barrier island bridges closed and tornadoes from then-Category 4 Milton began spinning onshore.

“It was a ghost town when we first left,” said Anna Maria Island Holmes Beach Police Chief William Tokajer, who the day before had advised anyone weathering the monster storm on the barrier island to “record your name and social security number write your leg.”

“The island has been secured,” he said late Wednesday morning. “We made one last pass and I didn’t see anyone still there.”

“We are off the island until the storm passes, so there will be no fire, no police, no ambulance, no first responders, no one answering the 911 calls for help that come in there,” Tokajer continued. “We have locked down the island and we will return after the storm has passed and check safety before letting people out.”

Puzzles, books, card games and a cold dinner

Marran, for her part, had earlier Wednesday weighed what she considered the worst risks of facing Milton on Isla del Sol, about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Holmes Beach, via the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

“It will be fine from the Gulf,” concluded the native Londoner, who lives on the second floor and has access to higher floors. “The wind is a problem. I’m worried about the wind, but you know, we have a plan to get to the interior areas of the condo tower.

As for the likelihood of power outages, “we have a lot of candles,” said Marran, who heads the homeowners association here. “Hopefully the iPads and the iPhones stay charged, you know, I have some puzzles. We have books. I do play cards,” especially the game of Hand and Foot, which uses up to six decks of cards – with jokers.

She, Speckhart and a few others also had enough food to cook, including some left by neighbors who had evacuated, and “things we can eat cold for a few days,” Marran said.

And of course, the residents of Isla del Sol, who planned to weather Milton’s wrath in the top risk area A – against all official advice – had each other.

“Once you get rid of the television,” she said, “you just have to talk.”

CNN’s Mary Gilbert, Rebekah Riess, Andy Rose and John Berman contributed to this report.