For days, residents of Florida’s Gulf Coast were ordered to evacuate as Hurricane Milton approached, less than two weeks after the southeastern United States was hit by Hurricane Helene.

But from her home in Tampa, directly in the path of the coming storm, Chynna Perkins decided to stay.

On Thursday morning, she said she, her husband Sterling and their pets weathered the storm but lost power.

As the storm came and went, Perkins detailed her situation to the BBC in a series of voice notes and calls, describing how Milton raced through her West Tampa neighborhood.

Her decision to stay was a matter of gut feeling, she said, after years of experiencing the storms in Florida. 25 miles east of the ocean and half a mile west of the Hillsborough River in Tampa, she felt protected from any storm surge.

“And as far as evacuation zones go, we are in one of the last ones. So, you know, I’m not worried,” she said.

The couple was also worried about finding a place to live. “With two dogs over 200 pounds, that’s a big deal,” she said.

Here is her account of the storm as it came and went.

The morning in Tampa was typical, Perkins said. “When I woke up it was gray, light drizzle.”

She and Sterling had spent days preparing. They bought canned goods, sandwiches, water and extra dog food. They filled their bathtubs with water, charged their phones, emergency lights and batteries.

“Our neighborhood is boarded up,” she said. Half of the historic homes in her West Tampa neighborhood were covered by plywood.

Her own home, a modern and well-maintained one-story house painted white, had temporary Kevlar coverings on all the doors and windows. “We are as prepared as we can be,” she said.

At the moment she felt safe. “There is no reason for us to be on the move, using up resources and hotel rooms and contributing to traffic and congestion,” she said.

Within a few hours the weather appeared to have deteriorated. The sky over Perkins’ house had turned completely gray.

“The rain and wind are definitely increasing, you can hear that,” she said as she walked onto her patio, where small puddles of water were beginning to form on her back lawn.

At 5:30 p.m. EDT (21:30 GMT), the rain became heavier and was carried diagonally across the sky by the whipping wind.

“The wind is starting to pick up,” Perkins said again. The gusts raged over her voice, almost drowning her as she spoke on the phone.

At this point, Milton’s gaze drifted toward the coast, only about an hour from landfall.

“The wind is really starting to whip,” Perkins said. “We get very heavy rain for 20 to 30 minutes, then there is a period of calm.”

“My anxiety was skyrocketing the whole time. I try not to throw up when I think about it. “It’s very, very scary just to see and hear how powerful it is,” she added.

“The fear comes from the waiting game. We’ve known this hurricane is coming for four days. I just want to get through it so I can stop feeling this way.”

Shortly after Milton reached Florida, the lights went out.

“We’re still good, except for the dip in performance that we expected,” Perkins said. “It feels like we’re in a tornado without the whistling sound. We’ve seen a few transformers burn out in our neighborhood just by looking from the back porch.”

They don’t have a generator, so they played a game of Jenga in the dark. Sterling took up a temporary post at the sliding glass door that leads to her backyard. “He kind of went into worst-case scenario mode,” Perkins said.

She didn’t expect the storm to be so strong. But she didn’t regret staying.

“There’s some sort of relief in the sense that it’s there.”

“Okay, tomorrow after,” Perkins said, sending a video clip from her backyard. “We have clear skies.”

It was still windy, she said, but no fallen trees were visible and her house wasn’t really damaged.

“We weathered the storm well,” she said. “You can hear people’s generators already starting up and chainsaws running in the background, so it sounds like people are already getting to work.”

But there was still no electricity. Perkins’ home is near Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, where members of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department are staying.

“I hope this means we get power sooner rather than later.”