By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Victor Linero was closely following the news about Hurricane Milton as it moved toward Florida when he unexpectedly saw a live tornado video close to his grandfather’s residence — hours before the hurricane was expected to strike on the other side of the state.
In a state of alarm, Linero immediately alerted his grandfather via phone, urging him to seek shelter.
“I was shouting, ‘Papi, find shelter right now!’” Linero, 26, who was raised by his grandfather, recalled. “Then I started hearing, ‘Oh, my God. Ahh!’”
He heard his grandfather, Alejandro Alonso, 66, emit a final scream before the line went dead.
When it was all over, two tornadoes had swept through Spanish Lakes Country Club Village, the retirement community north of Fort Pierce where Alonso resided. They had obliterated mobile homes, upended trucks, and uprooted trees, all while Hurricane Milton was still nearly 200 miles away in the Gulf of Mexico.
Ultimately, Alonso, his 70-year-old girlfriend, and four others were dead. Approximately 125 homes, all mobile, were destroyed. This was one of Hurricane Milton’s most perplexing paradoxes: that an area located far from where the hurricane made landfall experienced more fatalities than any other specific location during the disaster.
“We weren’t in an evacuation zone,” said Anita Perrotta, who resides in the community with her husband, as she recounted how they took shelter in their home at Spanish Lakes while debris struck it.
“We really didn’t suffer damage from the hurricane itself when it eventually passed,” she stated. “The destruction was solely caused by these tornadoes.”
It is common for hurricanes to spawn tornadoes as their outer bands make landfall, but the sheer number and intensity of the ones that struck on Wednesday shocked many. They formed hours in advance of the hurricane’s damaging winds, prompting residents to rush into homes, gas stations, and hotel lobbies — wherever they could secure refuge at the last moment.
Following the storm, residents believed that the most severe impacts of Milton would be felt elsewhere in the state, particularly where the storm was approaching from the Gulf of Mexico.
At Spanish Lakes, where both seasonal residents and full-time inhabitants enjoy a typical Florida retirement lifestyle full of activities like bocce ball and bingo, warnings about the looming storm had not gone unheard, even on the Atlantic Coast. The community comprises 1,285 residences that include newer concrete homes that can generally withstand storms as well as more vulnerable mobile homes.
For several days, residents had been monitoring Hurricane Milton’s trajectory closely. However, the most intense winds and rains didn’t seem likely to affect their area.
As tornadoes began to spin around the state, far in advance of the hurricane’s approach, frantic family members started checking in on relatives living at Spanish Lakes.
Brandi Smith noted she had spoken to her mother, Debbie Kennedy, 66, a retired nursing home janitor who had relocated to Spanish Lakes from upstate New York in March, earlier that Wednesday.
She said her mother felt secure in her mobile home. If conditions worsened, she told her daughter, she was aware of a school a few miles away that had been designated as a shelter.
“But they still had hours before the storm hit,” Smith remarked. “It wasn’t a concern.”
Suddenly, she realized her text messages to her mother were no longer going through. She began searching online for updates, connecting with numerous individuals. One person offered to visit a nearby hospital to show staff a picture of her mother.
On Thursday morning, rescuers discovered Kennedy’s body in the vicinity.
Smith described her mother as a devoted parent and grandmother, well known in Union Springs, New York, for her elaborate Halloween decorations. She often joked that she wanted to be buried beside her late husband, who passed away in 2021, stating she would haunt her daughter unless it happened.
Since her mother’s passing, that has become her daughter’s main priority: bringing her mother home for burial.
John Brennan, the community manager at Spanish Lakes, indicated that the mobile homes lost represented about 10% of the total housing in the community. Even those residing in the more robust concrete structures expressed feeling genuinely frightened during the tornadoes’ onslaught.
“It was incredibly frightening,” said Pat Pinette, 70, recounting how the walls of her house vibrated as the tornado approached. “We feared our cement wall would collapse on us.”
Pinette described the tornado’s sound as akin to a freight train, growing louder until she and her husband decided to retreat to their laundry room. However, the tornado swiftly moved past their street. They didn’t even manage to close the laundry room door before it was all over.
She mentioned that her husband’s aunt was knocked over by the tornado’s winds, which reopened a recent surgery incision. One of her cousins, Frank Gormley, was sitting in a recliner in his house when it was essentially swept away by the tornado.
“The next thing you know, he found himself lying on someone’s roof,” said Gormley’s brother, Joe.
“His neighbors told me they would photograph his house if there was any rubble to show me, but there’s not even rubble left,” Joe Gormley recounted. “Some of these homes were lifted and flipped onto their sides. Some had walls blown down, others lost roofs. His was completely gone.”
Frank Gormley remained hospitalized on Friday afternoon, awaiting hand surgery but, aside from that, not seriously injured. “He’s so bruised up, they’re concerned about blood clots,” his brother explained.
After the tornadoes passed, a thorough search-and-rescue operation commenced. Officers moved from house to house, spray-painting a large red “X” on the ones they had already checked. Not all victims have been publicly named.
The extent of the destruction within the retirement community left some individuals in the dark regarding their family members’ statuses for over a day.
Kelli King-Wolfcale spent all of Thursday searching for her 84-year-old mother, Sandra MacDonald, who lived on Montoya Way, one of several streets severely impacted in the neighborhood. By Thursday evening, she received the heartbreaking news: Her mother had not made it.
Like many survivors after the storm, her sorrow was accompanied by a sense of disbelief. “No one anticipated anything like this would occur,” she remarked.
