VENICE, Fla. — Hurricane Milton is making its way towards Florida's west coast as a Category Five storm. Some of the people preparing for landfall have ties to the Quad Cities.
40 miles south of Tampa, a nursing home in Sarasota, Florida, is bracing for impact — again. Debra Kettler is an admissions director at Aspire at Beneva, and a former Coal Valley resident. She helped prepare for Hurricane Helene, and she'll be preparing for Milton on Tuesday.
"We met every day, we talked twice a day on who was doing what, do we have all our supplies, who's gonna work here and who's gonna work there," Kettler said. "Making sure we have all the supplies, the food, the medicine."
That medicine is crucial. Staff need to gather enough to get their residents through a potential week of power outages.
"During Helene last week, we had to check all the medicines, and make sure we had enough medicine for everybody to get through the week," Kettler said. "Because if it hit us, if it was a direct hit, our pharmacy is in Tampa, we would not have gotten their medicine, so we had to make sure they had an ample supply of medicine, and that’s what they're probably doing today."
This time around, preparation is an even taller task. Kettler's nursing home is hosting 73 residents from a sister facility in a mandatory evacuation zone 10 miles north. That's in addition to the 106 regular residents.
At her home in Venice, Kettler avoided the worst of Helene. It's now in the voluntary evacuation zone for Milton.
"Everything stops, and you just prepare. That’s just what you have to do," Kettler said.
But she didn't have to stop everything until four years ago, when she and her husband moved from Coal Valley to Florida. They endured Hurricane Ian in 2022.
"Ian is probably why I have so much anxiety now," Kettler said. "That was like, 24 hours of wind and wind and rain and watching trees fall and watching limbs fall and watching things break."
She said she'd rather go through a tornado than another hurricane.
"They may take a whole town out, but it’s a matter of seconds, minutes. Hurricanes go on, and on, and on, and on, and you just watch mother nature crash around you," Kettler said.
With preparations at her home complete, all Kettler can do is hope for the best.
"Hopefully, come Thursday, everybody will be fine, and the home will be fine, and we'll just carry on what we do all the time," Kettler said.