First the roar of the wind, then the hum of the generator.

Such is the sequence during a hurricane.

Chris Braswell, a 1999 Baker High School graduate who has lived in Lake Wales, Florida, since 2020, watched Hurricane Milton buffet the city about 50 miles east of Tampa Bay late on Wednesday, Oct. 9.

“It lived up to the hype,” Braswell said the storm, which meteorologists said was the strongest hurricane to hit Tampa Bay in more than a century.

Braswell said the storm was noticeably more powerful, particularly its wind gusts, than Hurricane Ian in late September 2022.

Braswell and his wife, Tawnie, stayed in a friend’s home during Milton along with three of their adult children and five Labrador retrievers.

The home, about eight miles from the couple’s manufactured home, is the same place they sheltered during Hurricane Ian.

Braswell said Milton’s gusts peaked between 10 p.m. and midnight Eastern time on Wednesday.

Then the storm’s eye passed, creating what he called the “strangest phenomenon.”

“The wind just stops,” Braswell said. “It doesn’t just taper off, it just quits all of the sudden.”

That happened about 12:30 a.m. on Thursday.

He said the winds strengthened again after the eye moved away, but not to the same velocities as earlier in the storm.

Braswell said he drove to his home around 6:30 a.m. and was pleased to see that damage was limited to some siding.

He’s a contractor by trade, and he planned to repair the damage later on Thursday.

Braswell said conditions were “calm and quiet” on Thursday afternoon.

Quite a few people had emerged from their shelter to assess the damage and turn on their generators, as the power, not surprisingly, was out.

Braswell said his generator was powering his refrigerator, freezer and air conditioner.

Relatively few people in Lake Wales appeared to have evacuated, Braswell said.

Hurricanes typically weaken as they progress inland from the Gulf of Mexico, he said.

Braswell said the local WalMart was closed on Thursday, but there were several power company trucks parked in the store’s lot, ready to start restoring electricity.

He said one significant different he noticed with Milton, compared with Ian, is that far more people covered their windows with plywood prior to Milton.

Braswell said he drove by a Lowe’s home improvement store a couple days before the storm and saw that workers had taken the entire stock of plywood and stacked it in the parking lot to meet the demand.

Braswell said he was anxious to find out how one of his recent renovation projects weathered Milton.

His client lives in Sarasota, near where the hurricane made landfall. The owner hired him to install new, hurricane-resistant windows in her home. Braswell said he waited to do the work until after Hurricane Helene had passed in late September.

“And before the caulk could dry, I started hearing reports of another hurricane,” Braswell said with a chuckle.

He said he talked to his client on Wednesday, and she was evacuating to a shelter. He talked with her after the storm and learned that the windows he had installed had withstood the hurricane.