On Monday afternoon in Tampa, the skies were gray, but outside of the shrill of a circular saw at the neighbor’s house, and the hum of drills at the one next to his, it was hard to tell that the second-storm-of-a-century in 11 days is moving towards our neck of the woods.
Creative Loafing Tampa Bay went to press last night, a day early and a few pages lighter, in the hopes of keeping delivery drivers out of harm’s way—and to give our staffers a chance to ready their homes and families for Hurricane Milton (I believe you have my stapler, please).
In print, and online, there’s arts coverage, live music previews, food scene updates, and lots of news, but we’ve mostly left space for what’s about to happen over the next few days.
By the time this note was published online Tuesday, Milton was a Category 4 major hurricane still expected to make landfall near or in Tampa Bay on Wednesday night. Our region is once again bracing for another life-changing blow, even heavier than the one it took days prior.
Everyone reading this knows a handful of people who lost pretty much everything except their lives to Helene. Milton could very well put us in the same boat, with our names on a GoFundMe page, and our eyes crossed after spending hours working through FEMA and insurance websites all while literally wringing what’s left of our lives out on debris-filled streets.
For now, we watch Denis Phillips and hope for a change of fortune for Tampa Bay.
In the run up to the storm, and in its immediate aftermath, there’ll be a lot of information about where to get help and relief; we’ll share that on here for as long as we’re still online. But there’ll be misinformation floating around, too, along with plenty of bad actors and worse AI clogging up your relatives’ social media feeds; we’ll skip all that.
In the coming weeks, months, and maybe even years, we’ll wonder what we could have done differently (Ben Montgomery’s column about a 30-mile walk on Tampa Bay’s barrier islands asks one of the toughest questions around). But for now, we’ll all do the best we can, and we’re going to take care of each other, too.
Last Sunday night, a CL contributor texted to say that their family was loading up their mom and headed for Valdosta, possibly Atlanta or Charleston after that.
“Got friends there,” he wrote. “Be safe!”
I replied, “Godspeed.”
And that’s what I hope for you, too. With any luck, your friends at CL will all still be here, ready to do the hard work of getting back up (and feeding each other, like the Shady Hills little leaguers pictured above).
It’ll be tough to ignore how we got here, but if and when it starts to feel better—let’s not forget how tough we all are, and what got us through.
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This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2024.