Cindy Miller wasn’t sure where to begin the cleanup this weekend at her home in Englewood, Fla. Hurricane Milton had drenched her home and dumped debris everywhere. Much of it was not even hers. A sofa, doors and shoes littered the backyard, along with detritus that remained from Hurricane Helene, the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland in nearly two decades.

“You work all your life to live in paradise and a hurricane comes and kicks you right in the butt,” said Ms. Miller, 70, who retired to Florida 15 years ago.

Around 700 miles north, in the rugged, craggy version of paradise that is the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, Drew Reisinger was still reeling from Helene, which had left him and his neighbors without running water for two weeks and counting. He had just poked a tiny hole into the bottom of a grocery bag full of water, and was using it as a makeshift shower head.

Storm-weary residents are climbing out of the ruins left behind by two different hurricanes in two different locations. Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida on Sept. 26, then plowed through the South, including North Carolina. Hurricane Milton made landfall on Oct. 9 on the west coast of Florida.

Florida, a state where hurricanes are an enduring fact of life, avoided the worst-case scenario and is beginning to recover. Western North Carolina and its population center of Asheville, unaccustomed to frequent hurricanes, are still staggered by a storm that caught many off guard.

“Hurricanes no longer hit the coastline and then die,” said Beth Zimmerman, who led disaster operations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Obama administration, and is now a senior executive adviser with IEM, an emergency management consultant firm. “Everybody needs to be looking not to what they experienced in the past, but what is happening now in terms of hurricanes and extreme weather.”

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