NEW ORLEANS — As the sun came up Thursday, the world got its first look at some of the devastation from Hurricane Milton. The Category 3 storm made landfall near Siesta Key, Florida Wednesday evening — roughly an hour south of Tampa.
Three friends evacuated from the Tampa Bay area to New Orleans prior to landfall.
“I don’t know what I’m going home to," Alija Cancar said.
The friends are keeping tabs on what's happening at home through social media and news outlets.
A neighbor checked on Nikola Maljkovic's family home.
"We have a lot of debris everywhere. Like tree branches and some stop signs that came out of the ground and things like that," Maljkovic said.
The friends know that they, and many others, lost power, the internet, and water. However, they don't know the true extent of the damage from hundreds of miles away.
What they do know is, a fixture in their community took a direct hit.
“That roof was blowing in that wind like it was fabric," Cancar said.
Tropicana Field is home to the Tampa Bay Rays, but it serves as a routine staging area for state and local emergency management partners during storms, according to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
“The roof on that is not rated for – I think it’s rated for 110 MPH," DeSantis said, "And so, you know, the forecast changes, but as it became clear that there was going to be something of that magnitude that was going to be in the distance, they redeployed them out of Tropicana.”
Thankfully, DeSantis said at a press conference on Thursday that linemen and other resources were moved before Hurricane Milton made landfall.
The MLB team said in a statement Thursday that "no one was hurt by the damage" to the ballpark.
The images of the stadium feel eerily similar to those of the Superdome following Hurricane Katrina.
“The same thing minus the flooding happened to us," Maljkovic said.
Just as the dome is a symbol of New Orleans, Tropicana is a beloved monument for those in the Tampa Bay area.
“Most of the high schools in Pinellas County graduate at Tropicana so that’s like a big memory for all of us. You know baseball games, events, things like that, and it’s just such a focal point of the downtown area," Maljkovic said, "And so, to see something like that that’s such a monumental thing in our downtown area destroyed is wild.”
The Rays shared on social media that damage assessments will be done in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, the team is working with law enforcement to secure the building.
The team is supposed to break ground on a new ballpark in St. Petersburg in the coming months.
So, while the future of Tropicana is uncertain, the Dome serves as a reminder that things can be built back better than before.
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