As Hurricane Milton barreled towards Florida’s Gulf Coast, one mother found herself stranded amid her family’s attempts to evacuate. Recounting her family’s harrowing attempts to flee to safety ahead of the Category 3 hurricane, TikToker Sarah Lutzker said that a lack of available gas forced her and her family to turn back around and ride out the storm in a high-rise apartment building in central St. Petersburg.
“We tried to get out. We couldn’t … there’s no gas,” Lutzker told her followers. “We got to a certain point where we’re either an hour-and-a-half from turning around and going home, or continuing to drive being four hours, without traffic included, to the closest hotel with an opening and no gas on the side of the roads. Either we kept going, risked getting stranded, or we turned around and came home.”
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According to Lutzker, when they finally made it back home, they had just 17 miles left in their gas tank. Her family had been attempting to travel to safety in Atlanta, Georgia, Lutzker adding that, “We weren’t planning on staying. We were planning on trying to be safe, and we really did try, and we couldn’t get to where we were trying to go, and there was no hotels closer. So we’re home now, waiting for Milton.”
Lutzker was far from the only Floridian to experience issues when attempting to evacuate. According to NBC News, numerous residents said they encountered a shortage of gas, gridlocked roads, few hotel options, and no flights out of the area. Others, meanwhile, were unable to evacuate due to vehicles left damaged from Hurricane Helene. Lutzker said that amid the ongoing news surrounding the hurricane, people were forgetting that “evacuating is kind of a privilege.”
“I don’t know how it’s legal, but hotels and plane tickets out of here, a couple days before, they skyrocket. Not all hotels allow pets – I’m not going anywhere without my cats,” she shared. “You can only leave if you have money to leave, and a lot of people don’t, because not only are they spending thousands of dollars on one of the last seats on the plane, they now need to have money for a hotel.”
Forced to ride out the storm at home, Lutzker assured her followers that she and her family were taking some precautions. In a follow-up post, she shared that they filled the bathtub with water and were planning to move their mattress into a room “far from the windows” amid concerns of projectiles due to debris still on the streets from Hurricane Helene.
Milton made landfall Wednesday evening near Siesta Key as a Category 3 storm and carved a path east-northeastward toward Cape Canaveral with maximum sustained winds of 85 miles per hour. As of most recent reporting, more than 3 million people have been left without power.