Storm Vets

First Lt. Cole Nail will likely never forget his part in the Florida National Guard’s response to Hurricane Milton.

Neither will the people he encountered.

Only hours after Milton slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast near here the night of Oct. 9, Nail found himself wading through cold, chest-deep water with other members of A Troop, 1st Squadron, 153rd Cavalry Regiment, searching for victims.

They encountered some in bad shape in a flooded house in Brandon, Florida.

“The guy had been sitting in water for about five hours when we got to him,” Nail said. “He was so hypothermic his skin was turning blue.”

The soldiers arrived just in time to save the elderly man, his three family members and five dogs. Using Zodiac boats provided by the Hillsborough County, Florida, Fire Department, they ferried the group to safety and medical care.

Nail said he was happy to include the dogs in the rescue. He loves dogs, and just opened his home to a German shepherd the week before.

The lieutenant is a traditional, or M-Day, Guardsman. He drills in Bonifay on the Florida panhandle. He transferred to the Florida Guard in 2020 after joining the Alabama Guard in 2018. Nail works full time as a Budweiser salesperson. Hurricanes hit close to home for Nail as both citizen and soldier — he estimates Milton marks his fifth Guard deployment for one of the storms.

“Especially if you’re M-Day — you could be in that same situation,” he says.

Milton made landfall near Siesta Key. The storm packed Category 3 winds of 120 mph that knocked out power to millions of people in Florida and caused at least 24 deaths and more than $50 billion in property damage.

The destruction included the roof at Tropicana Field, the domed stadium Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays call home in St. Petersburg.

The Guard is a good fit for addressing such emergencies, said Lt. Col. Dan Brown, the 1-153rd Cav’s squadron commander. Brown was one of roughly 200 Guardsmen from his unit who arrived in Hillsborough County, Florida, in a state active-duty status before Milton’s landfall.

Once staged, they performed search and rescue, point of distribution of food and water, debris removal, route clearance, traffic control and law enforcement support missions at various times before, during and after the storm.

It is rewarding because when soldiers join the National Guard, this is what they want to do.

—Lt. Col. Dan Brown, the commander of the Florida Army National Guard's 1st Squadron, 153rd Cavalry Regiment

“It is rewarding because when soldiers join the National Guard, this is what they want to do,” said Brown, a Florida resident of 23 years and an Active Guard Reserve soldier based in St. Augustine on the state’s Atlantic coast. He is also the vice president of the National Guard Association of Florida.

Milton marked the Florida Guard’s third hurricane activation in under three months after Hurricanes Debby and Helene. This year’s Atlantic storm season underscored how prone the Sunshine State is to hurricanes. Brown said Florida Guardsmen are sometimes both storm responders and victims.

“We end up needing to get them back to their homes so that they can tend to the damage that the storm produced there,” he said.

Fortunately, states and territories in the path of a major storm routinely get help from the Guard in other states and territories. Florida received Guard help from 21 other states.

One was Ohio, which deployed 32 airmen from the 200th RED HORSE Squadron to Tampa the day after Milton’s landfall. Bearing chainsaws and skid steers, these airmen cleared routes for emergency vehicles and other traffic, removing debris from Hillsborough County’s roads.

“When they start to get overloaded — or when you have one a week after the other and your guys are just spent — it’s important to be able to call out and ask for help,” said Capt. Jonathan Rodriguez-Lucas of the 200th RHS.

Rodriguez-Lucas is a drill-status Guardsman who works at a NASA contractor as a civilian. During the 200th RHS’s Milton response, he said some Hillsborough County residents applauded when his unit cleared a tree from one of their roads.

This help comes via the Emergency Management Assistance Compact. Approved by Congress in 1996, the EMAC facilitates immediate state-to-state assistance during state or federally declared emergencies. The gaining state picks up the tab later.

Often, that help involves Guard personnel or equipment. After Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, EMAC enabled other states and territories to deploy nearly 50,000 Guardsmen nationwide to the affected areas to help.

Florida Guardsmen began preparing on the ground for Milton more than a week before the storm made landfall. Spc. Damian Williams, a member of the 1-153rd Cav’s Bravo Troop, arrived in Tampa eight days before. Of the five hurricanes he has responded to since joining the Guard in 2020, Williams said Milton was “probably the worst one,” with wind “like a train coming down.”

Williams helped place a string of water-filled fabric tubes between one of the city’s waste-recycling plants and Tampa Bay. So-called Tiger Dams have largely replaced sandbags as a flood-control system. They’re quicker to emplace and form a strong barrier against flooding. In this case, the aim was to prevent Milton from damaging the plant and spilling waste into Tampa Bay.

After the storm passed, traffic control points prevented disposal sites from getting overwhelmed by debris and ensured supplies reached the public quickly and efficiently.

Florida Guardsmen set up one such TCP in downtown St. Petersburg outside a fuel point for the public that involved 10 tanker trucks. Local authorities established the site to alleviate a major fuel shortage after the storm.

Second Lt. Jared Blanco and other members of D Company, 753rd Brigade Engineer Battalion, then blocked off and directed traffic in and out of the temporary facility.

The 753rd BEB is from nearby Pinellas Park. A drill-status Guardsman, Blanco works as a software engineer for L3 Harris when not serving as an electronic warfare platoon leader for the unit. He said Florida Guardsmen's personal experience with major storms comes in handy when helping other Floridians after a hurricane.

“We know what it is like to have to get to work and your house is flooded and all the million things that go on in your mind because of the chaos,” he said.

In all, 6,794 Guard soldiers and airmen from 22 states responded to Milton, according to the Florida National Guard Public Affairs Office.

Over the course of the three hurricanes this year, Guardsmen in Florida rescued 919 people and 134 animals, cleared 5,274 miles of roads and delivered 2,561,298 combat meals, 3,393,343 boxes of water and 161,418 tarps, the Florida PAO said.

The author is the NGAUS senior writer/editor. He can be reached at mark.hensch@ngaus.org.

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TOP PHOTO: A Florida Army Guard chaplain comforts Hurricane Milton-struck residents of Port St. Lucie, Florida. (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Chelsea Smith)