In Sarasota – a city hard-hit by Ian last year – Milton Bontrager, 40, who runs a charter fishing service near Tampa, said his home was boarded up and stocked with food, water and a generator, and his boats were secure.

“I don’t panic, I prepare,” he said on Tuesday.

“They’re expecting some fatalities, so I don’t want to be one of them,” Rene Hoffman, 62, said as she readied to leave her home in Steinhatchee, Florida, which is in the projected landfall zone.

She owns a food stand that she lashed to her husband’s pickup truck to keep it from washing or blowing away.