My family moved to Florida in January 2021 and bought a house in Daytona Beach five months later. Although we had some heavy rains during our first year, we experienced our first real Florida storm when Ian came to town at the end of September. Ian hit southwest Florida as a category 4 hurricane, but was only a tropical storm when it reached Daytona Beach.

The attitude of my Volusia County neighbors to the storm – preparing long in advance, recognizing that forecasts change often in the days before a storm, and refusing to panic – was a refreshing change from the toilet paper-buying stampedes common in the North before a snowstorm. As new Floridians, we adopted the local attitude.

We had professionals cut down weak trees and prune tree limbs when we bought the house. We replaced three single-paned windows with impact-rated glass. Finally, we had bought a small generator – one that plugs into the house mains, and can power a large appliance like a refrigerator as well as some lights – and made sure we always had small propane tanks and five-gallon steel cans of gasoline on hand. When we heard (ironically, from Northern relatives) that Ian was likely to hit Florida, we looked at the weather forecast, but didn’t obsess over it. We knew where the local shelter was – a public high school one mile from our house – and we knew we had food in the house.

Our neighborhood, which is on an older section of the grid, tends to lose power easily, so we were not surprised when the power went out at 5:57 a.m. on Sept. 29. We were disappointed, but not surprised, that the internet went out too. (We had battery backup for our router, so if the ISP had been up and running, we would have remained in business.)

After the rain and wind died down on Thursday, I did my typical four-mile run along International Speedway Boulevard, where the damage was minimal – leaf-strewn parking lots, a few signs down, some street lights out. Then my daughter and I drove around our own small neighborhood of Daytona Highlands, which is a mix of houses dating from the 1920s through the 1980s, with Italian cypress trees, live oak trees, palms, and palmettos.

The damage was fairly predictable. Unbalanced trees had split, and unpruned limbs had fallen. Wooden stockade fence panels had been blown down. A quick read of NextDoor.com indicated that some houses close to the Halifax River had water intrusion. And I had to pull a garbage bag’s worth of my snowbird neighbor’s leaves out of my pool.

Some of our friends never lost their power; others got it back within 24 hours. We were less lucky, and went about five days without power (other than our generator) or internet access (except through our phones, which never lost service). Although I didn’t enjoy refilling the generator and driving to Buc-ee’s gas station to refill the gas cans, our food never went bad, and I rescued a sizable amount of meat from the freezer of a neighbor who was out of town on business.

After my first real Florida storm, I still love it here. I’ll take it over a Nor’easter any day.