'We were very nervous' - Sarasota residents who sat out the hurricane

Carla Simionescu was reassuring relieved relatives yesterday morning on the phone, while she took photos of the tree branches, rocks, bits of wood and other debris littering the front yard and gravel driveway of her Sarasota house.

- Joseph Contreras

The 46-year-old waitress lives a mere six miles (10km) from the seaside community of Siesta Key on Florida's Gulf coast, where Hurricane Milton made landfall at around 8.30pm on Wednesday.

Simionescu ignored evacuation orders, covered her windows with planks of plywood, and rode out the hurricane with her 68-year-old mother and two young daughters.

"We were very nervous because it was a big storm, but we had a plan B and we were ready," shrugged the Uruguayan immigrant, who has seen her fair share of extreme weather since moving to Florida in 1997.

Compared with a 2005 hurricane in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Hollywood that toppled a construction crane on to a nearby service station and lifted one vehicle atop another, she intimated that Milton was no big deal.