COLUMBUS, Ohio — Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday evening. Before that, many people loaded up and got far away from the hurricane. For some, it meant coming all the way to central Ohio.
The McHugh family has called the Tampa area home for 23 years. They’ve come to know when it’s time to get out and head toward family in Lewis Center. Early Monday morning, Michael and Sara McHugh, their two daughters and the family dog piled into the SUV and hit the road. Their son opted to stay behind but go somewhere away from Tampa.
“You just watch the track heading right towards your home, your city and it’s like ‘we better get out of here,’” said Michael McHugh.
Even though they left before sunrise Monday morning, a lot of other people were getting the same idea to get out sooner rather than later.
“You could tell there was already a state of frenzy around you. The gas stations are lined with a 30 minute wait to gas and we were lucky to get gas at that time,” said Sara McHugh. “You can just feel people rushing around trying to get supplies, take care of their homes and make plans as fast as possible.”
One Ohioan headed into the storm. Dr. Anne Therese Stubbs owns an aesthetic medicine clinic, Anne Therese Aesthetic Medicine, in Cape Coral along with her two facilities in Gahanna and Polaris. She headed to Cape Coral this week to do her best to hurricane-proof her clinic that sits just a couple miles from the shore.
“We went through this with Ian and we got 6 or 7 inches of water through the entire office during Ian so we had to replace cabinets, lasers, we didn’t know any better at the time,” said Dr. Stubbs. “We did everything we could do to keep the water from coming in and we lifted all the lasers, anything expensive is on the counters, like four foot above.”
She showed 10TV photos of the work she and her family did there. The front door is barricaded and foamed shut. They’ve added caulking around the doors and windows. All of the chairs and equipment has been placed on top of tables and counters.
She left Cape Coral and headed inland to Fort Myers a few miles away to shelter until Hurricane Milton blows over.
“We evacuated. We were in Zone A. It was a mandate. We got the alert from Governor DeSantis that we had to get out, so we evacuated last night,” she said. “All you can really do is prep the best you can, put all the expensive stuff up and then you save human lives, and you get out when they tell you to get out.”
She and her family will stay at a home in Fort Myers until it’s safe to check on the clinic and get it back operational. She said it took about six weeks after Hurricane Ian and hopes it won’t be nearly as destructive with the preparations they took.
The McHughs will stay with family in Lewis Center until they feel it’s safe to return and see if their home had any damage. They were spared damage from Helene, but said debris from damaged homes still lined the streets because it hadn’t had time to be picked up.
“It’s so uncertain. I think uncertainty is always nerve wracking, just hoping everyone can come out as unscathed as possible,” said Michael McHugh.