Hurricane Milton destroyed many houses in coastal communities across the greater Tampa Bay region.
But it also hit plenty of inland areas ... hard.
Tracy Boyette has lived in her house near Lakeland — or what's left of it — for 17 years.
"Everything was damaged,” Boyette said. “Oh, my God, I never seen mold grow so fast and so far up the walls and how wet [it was]. I mean, there was mold in places I didn't assume it could get in."
Her walls had to be completely removed, along with most of the floors.
After the storm passed, Tracy and her husband Danny thought they had made it out OK.
But in the days after, the basin next to their home kept rising with floodwater. After a couple of days, they woke up to water in their bedroom.
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"And [there’s a] separate toilet, which makes it nice, because you have your shower and everything,” Boyette said, pointing to a small section of their RV. “Then there’s the closet … the other bedroom. I mean, that's it."
For months now, they've been staying in the RV parked in the front yard.
"You gotta learn how to really pare down, you know,” she said. “You don't have everything there like you're used to. You gotta think, ‘Oh, I can't do that,’ or ‘I can't have that.’ "
And the fact that Tracy was recently diagnosed with early-onset dementia has made the ordeal that much more stressful.
"Dementia people, they have to have safety, they have to have that schedule, and I have had none of that,” Tracy said.
Danny works as a security guard, although he said it’s been a bit hard to focus in the midst of all the chaos.
“I still gotta have income,” Danny said. “We still got bills to pay, and on top of that, now we got a rental RV that we're having to pay, along with a mortgage, because that doesn't stop.”
The home still sprouts up damp spots randomly, Tracy said.
And apart from that, it's hard for either of them to go back into their home to get old paperwork or items.
“This whole thing to me, still, is like I'm watching it on TV,” Tracy said.
Worried what's next
Across the street, Jarrod Smith's house also sustained a lot of damage.
"It came up and flooded the entire patio, flooded up into the to the back porch, the interior, inside the sliding glass doors,” he said as he showed the areas where his home was hit the hardest.
Smith is a Hillsborough County firefighter and had to work during the brunt of the storm. When he came back, the water from the basin was rising fast.
Smith and his family were able to move much of his furniture out before the water came inside. But it would be a few weeks before a temporary pump was put in place to bring down the flooding.
"It was like you had to scream and jump on your rooftop and go on social media and post pictures and images and videos, just to try and get help,” Smith said.
Heather Sawtelle lives along the cul de sac at the end of the street that Smith and the Boyettes also share. The water didn’t get inside her home, but because of the basin overflowing, she and her husband — who’s a disabled veteran — weren’t able to leave for weeks.
“We had a lot of wildlife that we would not normally have, like alligators in our front yard,” Sawtelle said.
During that time, she said she was getting food delivered to her via boat.
When her husband got sick — which she believes was from the moisture — he fell in the floodwater trying to leave the house, and soon after found out he caught E. coli.
“I didn't even really know if he was going to make it,” Sawtelle said. “And here we are stuck in our homes. And I'm not saying that because he's a disabled veteran, he deserves something better than anybody else. We have other people in the neighborhood that could have very well needed something and would not have been able to get it.”
Now, she says they’re having to redo some of the flooring that caught and trapped some of the floodwaters.
Smith has been staying at a rental home nearby with his wife and kids. Months later, he says he still hasn't gotten any money from his home and flood insurance. And, he only received $750 from FEMA.
And even if he gets the money to make repairs and sell their home, he doesn't know if it's worth it. Not until he gets a guarantee from the county that something like this won't happen again.
“Two wrongs don't make a right,” Smith said. “I'm not going to put somebody else in the same situation … I don't want to do something bad to somebody else.”
Smith, the Boyettes and other neighbors want a permanent pump installed in the basin.
“We're not asking them to stop building,” Sawtelle said. “We're just asking them to fix the drainage to where they don't flood our homes just because they want to build new homes and because they get a lot of tax money out of new homes. We're for growth, but we're not for taking out houses at the expense of building a new neighborhood.”
Problems at the pump
Paul Womble, Polk County's emergency management director, says that's easier said than done.
"When you pump water, you got to make sure wherever that water goes, it's not a flood anybody else,” Womble said. “You hate it that somebody's flooded, but you can't pump water to get water out of a neighborhood, or in this case, out of a home, and then send that water downstream and then you put it in somebody else's home."
And changes to building codes would create new regulations for developers in the future, not for homes and communities that have already been built.
“That’s a known area that floods,” Womble said. “Could [development] have had an impact? Maybe. But maybe not as well.”
"People expect government of some level to come in and make them whole, just like it was, and put their house and their lives back together the day it was before the disaster. The programs just don't work that way."Paul Womble, Polk County emergency management director
Womble says he understands that people throughout Polk County are still struggling with Milton's aftereffects and asking for help.
He said it’s crucial that people are educated on their local flood zones.
In the case of Smith, Sawtelle, and the Boyettes, they're in flood zone ‘AE,’ meaning they have a 1% chance of flooding any year, and a 26% chance of flooding over a 30-year mortgage.
“That's pretty good odds for sports or anything else where odds might come into play,” Womble said. “So if you know that up front, then you know how important having a disaster plan is.”
But he said the local government primarily assists with short-term solutions, like temporary housing, not long-term fixes.
"People expect government of some level to come in and make them whole, just like it was, and put their house and their lives back together the day it was before the disaster,” Womble said. “The programs just don't work that way."
Womble said this storm brought issues to the county that had never been seen before, but in the future, Polk will have stronger plans in place because of it.
“If they had another flood today, we know the pump, we know the hose size,” Womble said. “We know the issues with the neighborhoods and not being able to block access in and out for the residents and emergency services. So if that same scenario unfolded, we could make that pumping operation happen quicker.”
Numb in the aftermath
For Tracy Boyette, she's trying to get help from any organization she can. But even starting that process is difficult.
"All this paperwork I had to attach, you don't know what that is like, to find all that stuff during a flood?” Boyette said. “And FEMA thinks it's right now, right now, right now. Red Cross, same way. It's hard pulling all that stuff up, coming from this big house to a flood."
A state program was recently announced that would help homeowners offset the cost of elevating their homes. Qualified homeowners only have to pay for 25% of the elevation raise, while the state covers the other 3/4ths.
But the Boyettes say they can’t afford that, especially after the costs of renting the RV and mitigating their losses from the storm.
“Just for mold mediation, that was $61,000,” Tracy said. “Who’s going to pay for that?”
For now, they feel stuck.
“We feel numb,” Danny said. “We can't move, we can't do anything.”
“We don't even talk about rebuilding anything anymore,” Tracy said. “We don't do anything, because why get ahead of ourselves? We can't buy anything. We can't store anything.”
The Boyettes had a beautiful garden before the storm. But Milton washed away Tracy's plants and greenhouses, and decayed the ones still standing. The thing that could give her comfort through this is gone.
"I can't even go to my sheds,” Boyette said. “It's hard to stay happy. It's very, very hard. And you feel very, very lonely."
She used to put up an extravagant Christmas display during the holidays too. If she gets the chance to again, she says she'll keep the lights on all year long.
