For days, residents of Florida’s Gulf Coast were warned to evacuate as Hurricane Milton approached – less than two weeks after the southeastern US was ravaged by Hurricane Helene.

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

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

As the storm came and went, Perkins talked the BBC through her situation with a series of voice notes and phone calls, describing how Milton swept through her West Tampa neighborhood.

Her decision to stay was a matter of instinct, she said, after years of experiencing Florida’s storms. Twenty-five miles (40 km) east of the sea, 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’re in one of the last. So you know, I’m not worried,” she said.

The couple also worried about finding accommodation. “With two dogs over 200 pounds, that’s a big thing,” 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 prepared for days. They bought canned goods, bread supplies, 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. The historic homes in her West Tampa neighborhood were half-hidden under plywood.

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

For now she felt safe. “There is no reason for us to take up resources and hotel rooms along the way and contribute to traffic and congestion,” she said.

Within hours the weather seemed to have deteriorated. The sky above Perkins’ house had turned completely gray.

“The rain and the wind are definitely increasing, you can hear it,” she said as she walked outside onto her patio, where small puddles of water were beginning to form in her backyard.

At 5:30 PM EDT (21:30 GMT), the rain intensified, carried by the whipping wind diagonally across the sky.

“The wind is really starting to pick up,” Perkins said again. The gusts of wind howled through her voice, almost drowning her out on the phone.

At this point Milton’s eye crept towards the coast, about an hour away from landfall.

“The wind is really starting to blow,” Perkins said. “We will have 20-30 minutes of very heavy rain, then a dead period.”

“My anxiety has been through the roof all the time. I try not to throw up when I think about it. It’s very, very scary to see and hear how powerful it is,” she added.

“The fear comes from the waiting. We’ve known for four days that this hurricane is coming. I just want to get through it so I don’t feel like this anymore.

Shortly after Milton reached Florida, the lights went out.

“We’re still doing well, minus the loss of power, which we expected,” Perkins said. “It feels like we’re in a tornado, without the whistling sound. We have seen a few transformers explode in our neighborhood just by looking outside from the porch.”

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

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

“There’s a sense of relief, in the sense that it’s here.”

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

The wind was still blowing, she said, but there were no fallen trees to be seen and no real damage to her home.

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

But there was no power yet. Perkins’ home is close to Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, which houses members of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department.

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