There's nothing like a St. Petersburg sunset—a fire of hot pink and orange beneath a sea of deep blue. It eclipses the bustling downtown, the palmy pier, and the enormous dome of Tropicana Field. For a moment, the city traffic stops, and everyone takes it all in.

Sunsets won’t be the same after Hurricane Milton.

Hurricane Milton was a history-defining moment for St. Petersburg. There’s a before-Milton and an after-Milton. The monster storm ravaged my city—flooding its once-lively streets, tearing the roof off Tropicana Field, toppling cranes from the sky, and plunging millions into darkness.

I sheltered with my family in a flat-roofed office building on the outskirts of St. Pete. It wasn’t in a flood zone and was far from the ocean. We barricaded the glass doors with sandbags and brought essentials from our home—water bottles, portable snacks, flashlights, and the usual hurricane safety kit.

Another couple stayed with us, along with their paralyzed German Shepherd (poor dog… she was so anxious during the storm).

At first, we played Uno and other card games with the news on in the background. Outside, gusts picked up to about 35–50 mph, and rain pounded the roof. Puddles swelled with the downpour, and occasionally, a large branch would slam onto the ghostly roads.

Click.

Transformers and power lines exploded into fireworks of bright yellow.

Dennis Phillips, a veteran meteorologist, fell silent on the TV, and the room went pitch black. Water began to rise by the minute, and the gusts intensified into cyclonic winds—90 to 110 mph.

We were in the eyewall, and for those two eternal hours, Mother Nature was in charge. It was surreal—seeing the town I loved submerged in raging floodwaters. I took over Dennis Phillips’s job and became a special correspondent for my family, informing them of the latest updates. Every 10 minutes, I’d crack the door just a little to glimpse the chaos.

Swaths of debris churned in the rising floodwaters. At 10:00 PM—the peak of the storm —water crept up to the curb. We used rags to dry the water seeping through cracks in the doors and walls.

Trees snapped like pencils. The roof creaked as if it might be torn off at any moment. It became harder to open the door, so we trusted our intuition that the water wouldn’t flood the building.

Occasionally, the cellular Wi-Fi (somehow!) turned back on, and I’d see images of destruction. One that struck me was the shredded dome of Tropicana Field. People saw an ordinary baseball stadium, but I saw a core memory. That was where I watched my first MLB game, munching on crispy peanuts and sizzling pretzels.

I didn’t sleep that night—or, if I did, it was in 30-minute chunks. It felt like I was in a movie. This was my hometown being destroyed. This was my hometown on the news—not for something good, but for a devastating hurricane.

After futile tossing and turning, I woke up at 4:00 AM to an apocalyptic scene. Snapped power lines and roof shingles littered the area. Piles of mud and tawny leaves pockmarked the streets. Towering oak trees lay smashed on fences and apartment buildings.

Two teenagers sat distraught on top of a car. They asked, “Are you okay?” in a Southern accent. I replied with a sullen nod.

One of them, shivering, said, “If we’d opened the windows, we would’ve died. The water was so high.” Their house was across the parking lot from our building. Thankfully, we were on elevated ground, but the homes just 50 feet away were submerged.

St. Petersburg has been in the forecast for many hurricanes—Ian, Irma, Idalia, and Charley—but they all veered south or north. These storms left St.

Pete unscathed, wreaking havoc on neighboring cities like Port Charlotte and Fort Myers. But this time, Milton made landfall in Siesta Key—just 52 miles south of St. Pete. As Dennis Phillips put it, we faced “the squally side of the storm.”

What was different about Milton was that Hurricane Helene had hit the area just a week earlier. Helene pushed up to 7.8 feet of storm surge into Pinellas County (where St. Pete is located). That’s enough to flood garages and the first floors of homes and buildings.

The day after Milton, I passed through Madeira Beach, a lively beach town on the Gulf shore. I couldn’t tell whether the mountains of debris were from Milton or Helene. The roads had turned into sand dunes, and the traffic lights dangled while branches hung half-torn from trees.

This experience was different from seeing Tropicana Field. I saw Madeira Beach firsthand. People lived in those homes.

People drove on those roads. People relaxed on that beach. Madeira Beach is where memories were made, where people had fun. Now, it looks uninhabitable.

And now that I’ve had a chance to recover emotionally, I have to ask: How many more lessons do we need? How many near-misses can we take before lawmakers finally say, “Enough is enough?” How many people must die before action is taken? And will anything even change after Milton?

Without climate change, Hurricane Milton “would have made landfall as a Category 2 instead of a Category 3 storm," according to World Weather Attribution, an international scientific group. As Milton churned in the Gulf of Mexico, it intensified to a Category 5 hurricane in two days. NBC6 meteorologist John Morales cried on television as he witnessed the storm at its peak. He said, “I don’t need to tell you what’s driving this—global warming, climate change.”

Lawmakers in Washington already know what’s fueling these monstrous hurricanes. Demagogues are politicizing this crisis. Instead of taking action, they’re spreading disinformation plaguing FEMA and other disaster relief efforts.

It’s time to put our differences aside. Politics should never get in the way of saving lives.