BOONE, N.C. — Road crews in Boone recently finished repairs on Pinnacle Drive, allowing residents to drive down the mountain following Hurricane Helene's devastation.
The repair came just in time for Curtis Hubbard, who kept driving all the way to his home in Tampa, Florida, ahead of Hurricane Milton. Now, just days after riding out a storm in the North Carolina mountains, Hubbard is hunkering down for another potentially devastating hurricane.
"I filled up a whole bunch of sandbags and my old tires didn't like that," he said. "So I had a blowout in the middle of the night."
With an eye on the local news, Hubbard was busy Tuesday morning trying to clear his garage.
"The biggest concern I think right now is the storm swell," he explained. "Last week here in Tampa, it got about halfway up my driveway and didn't go in the garage. We were super lucky."
Things aren't looking so great for Milton, which is barreling toward Florida's Gulf Coast with the Tampa area square in the forecast cone.
"They're saying it's about 15 feet and what we experienced last week was about 7 to 8 feet," Hubbard said. "So now we're just anticipating the whole first floor being trashed. And so I'm trying to get everything that I care about to the second floor."
Hubbard said his decision to leave Tampa for Helene was based on the information he had at the time.
"My mom is up in North Carolina and she's had some health issues, so I didn't want to get trapped in Tampa from the storm," he said. "So I prepped here and then bugged out and went to North Carolina thinking I was gonna be in a better position."
Little did he know they'd be trapped in the mountains for about a week, recalling his experience with WCNC Charlotte before the roads were repaired. Now in a race against time, Hubbard said he had to make another quick decision.
"I was trying to be in a good spot up there and then this thing just materialized very quickly out in the Gulf," Hubbard said. "I still haven't seen my mom yet. I feel bad. I wanted to go see my mom and brother, they're in Greenville, North Carolina, so I didn't make it there. I just turned right around and came back to Tampa."
Working to put sandbags out and barricade his doors, Hubbard says he's at least comforted knowing his friends and kids are out of harm's way.
"All my neighbors are gone, there's nobody left in my neighborhood," Hubbard said. "I'm probably going to stay here for another day or so and then I can get out if they'll give me enough time. I don't think the storm is gonna hit until tomorrow (Wednesday) evening and that'll just give me time to prepare and try to get everything I can hand-carry up to the upper floor and hope the roof doesn't come off."
The Special Forces veteran said his time in the military has prepared him for these kinds of situations but it still has been a surreal couple of weeks.
"What I was thinking about most was my very first military combat zone was Desert Storm," he said. "It was really weird when you're crossing the berm from Saudi Arabia going to Iraq and you're seeing all the artillery fire in front of you. You're seeing horizons just exploding. It's pitch dark, but you see the lights. You can't really hear anything.
"There is a sense of that feeling down here because you see a lot of people going, like those linemen and power trucks, and they're going straight into harm's way and you don't know exactly what's going to happen."
Contact Jane Monreal at jmonreal@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.
