Connecticut Families In the Dark, But OK After Hurricane Matthew

Two Connecticut families who now live in Florida have no power, but they are grateful to be OK after Hurricane Matthew struck, leaving damage it is track. 

Barbara Plasse, who now lives in Stuart, Florida, said the wind and the rain were coming in every direction and they couldn’t get out their front door because the wind was so strong. 

Her family lives about 45 minutes north of West Palm Beach and her husband, Chris, put up storm shutters, then they all hunkered down and rode out the storm. 

“We thought, ‘OK, we’ll put our shutters on and we’ll be good.’ As they kept talking about it on the news, I started to panic a little and wished that we had left. In hindsight now, we did perfectly fine. We have very minor landscape damage,” Barbara Plasse said. 

The storm was especially bad in the Daytona Beach area, bringing strong winds and heavy rain. 

“The rain really was pelleting you. It almost felt like little pellets because of how fast the rain is coming down,” said Heidi Voight’s brother-in-law, Todd Borselle-Allen, who lives with his husband, Gary, in Deland, Florida, about 30 minutes from Daytona Beach. 

They lost power overnight, along with hundreds of thousands of other people. 

Todd and Gary prepared by placing sandbags around their back porch and stocking up on food and water, but said it was difficult to ride out the storm in the dark. 

“You hear trees falling down in the background and you just don’t know if it’s coming toward the house or going away from the house because you can’t see anything,” Todd Borselle-Allen said. 

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