the worst hit areas do seem to be areas where this isn't entirely uncommon.
e.g.
Danielle Theiss has lived on this street in east Orlando her entire life - she’s used to seeing these roads flooded.
Her house, with a river right behind it, was flooded so badly during a hurricane last year that her husband and two young children have been living in a camper van in her grandmother’s backyard across town.
"Last one was way worse," she says, as we stand looking down mangrove-lined stretch of her dead-end road.
You can see mailboxes just about poking up out of the water, as Theiss describes what’s happened to her neighbourhood.
"This house, I guarantee you is probably under water - and that one’s probably got water in it as well," she tells me.
"And right there, where you can see the green mailbox, it’s probably about six-feet deep or so right there. You gotta swim to get down there."
Most of her neighbours left before the storm, and can’t return to their houses until the waters recede.
In 2023, Hurricane Ian in 2023 caused this same street to be covered in so much water that her family required an aquatic evacuation.
That's not an unusual sight in hurricane-plagued Florida. "If people need out, we’ve got boats. We’ll come get em," she laughs. "We’re used to it."
The hurricane is moving into the Atlantic but is leaving behind floods, damaged buildings and millions without power and water.
www.bbc.co.uk