Hurricane Milton adds to Helene's devastation on Siesta Key

As Zack Morrish, Dale O’Hara and Dave Bano drove north through a desolate Siesta Key Village on Thursday afternoon, Morrish commented on how clean Ocean Drive looked compared to the aftermath of hurricanes and tropical storms in previous years.

“It’s usually not this clean this fast,” he said. “The water went down quicker.”

“Everything is a win at this point,” Morrish said.

But if you turned down any of the side streets east of Ocean Boulevard on the north side of Siesta Key, you would be hard-pressed to see any “wins.”

“It looks like Haiti,” Bano said, as he drove slowly to his Avenida de Mayo home.

Actually, it would be easy to think it looks worse.

Perusing all of the abandoned Avenida and Calle streets on the island, all you see lining both sides of the streets are 5-, 6- and 7-foot mounds of debris and rubble in front of virtually every home.

Photo by Observer Staff

Couches, dressers, washing machines, toilets, mirrors, carpets, cabinets, armoires, soaked drywall — you name it. Any and everything that fills most homes. And all of it is water logged and filling the air on Siesta Key with the smell of dead fish and saturated and rotting wood, cushion foam and fabric.  

As you peer down each street, it is as if you are looking at a county landfill with paths made for the trash trucks.

But this was not the aftermath of Wednesday’s Hurricane Milton. It was the aftermath of Hurricanes Milton and Helene.

“Last week, the pile in front of my house was my stuff. This week it’s someone else’s,” joked Morrish.

Actually, it was not a joke. The winds of Hurricane Milton redistributed the debris that didn’t get picked up after Helene.

The front yards of every home in these neighborhoods are littered with debris. The one-story homes are in the worst shape, practically indescribable, clearly uninhabitable.

Each time the Observer encountered the few people who made it onto the Key on Thursday afternoon to inspect their homes, they were unanimous saying the damage from Hurricane Helene was worse than Hurricane Milton. The latter just added to the devastation.

For certain, those who inspected their homes Thursday said the 10- and 15-foot storm surges that were forecasted for Milton didn’t materialize — and appeared to be lower than Helene’s.

Photo by Observer Staff

When Bano opened the first-floor door of his Avenida de Mayo home, he did it with trepidation, fearing the surge had struck for a second time. Two weeks ago, he had 2 feet of water flowing through the ground-level floor of his home.

When he walked in, the floors were bone dry. He picked at the remains of drywall at the base of a wall in his garage. It was powder. “That would have been soaking,” he said, if Milton’s surge had come through the house.

“I lost two cars with Helene,” Bano said. Assessing the damage after Milton, Bano was optimistic about finishing the drywall repairs inside and getting back to enjoying his island retirement home. “It could have been a lot worse,” he said.

Bano is the former president of claims for Nationwide Insurance. He remembers the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that destroyed New Orleans and much of the south. 

“In that one,” he said, “there were bodies. Bodies everywhere.”