My Hurricane Milton Diary: The week I nearly lost everything

Wednesday is spent waiting for updates and watching the radars. The skies are grey and it’s raining in Jacksonville.

Hope fades instantly as I hear the reporters say how catastrophic this hurricane will be when it hits.

Our house is predicted to get the north side of the eye of the storm – all the wind and rain, so flooding is a risk from overly-saturated ground. And then we see that the storm is predicted to hit north of Sarasota, basically in the bay itself.

Any further, tiny jump means we will get surge water from the bay as well. I have to stop watching. It is an anxious wait.

At around 21:00 (02:00 BST) the storm carries east when the predicted path was north, which means when it hits it will be south of the bay.

For us, it means the bay drains and we will avoid surge water, but for those south it means they’re getting that water, wind and rain.

Then come the reports of people who remained in their homes calling for emergency services to get them out, but once hurricane force winds hit the emergency services will not be sent out.

I watch the cameras on our house and can see the bushes and trees moving. But as the storm moves through we still have a house intact. It feels incredible, how unlikely it was that we’d have anything left and how close to it we came.