A TikToker’s Florida home flooded 3 times in 4 years. Now, she’s raising it by 12 feet

By Denise Hruby, Miami Herald (TNS)

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Exhausted, though relieved to have survived, is how Dr. Meghan Martin summarized her Hurricane Milton experience in her first post-storm update to her more than 2 million TikTok followers last week.

“These hurricanes, man, like, back to back like this,” she said as she ruffled her short, wavy hair and exhaled.

The emergency pediatrician, a Florida native, rode out the storm with her four kids at the St. Petersburg hospital where she works, while her husband and their four cats evacuated to her in-laws’ home farther south.

In the end, the damage to her family’s house was limited to a few fallen trees in the backyard. At this point, though, it doesn’t really matter, Martin told the Miami Herald, “because it’s not like we had anything left to lose.”

Within four years, hurricane-induced storm surge has flooded her home three times. Each time, she and her family have coped with the nightmarish before and after, the anxiety of watching the storm approach on forecasts, the despair of seeing the water rise and enter their home, the stress of finding temporary shelter.

More than a year ago, after assessing the flood damage from Hurricane Idalia, she made up her mind: The house, which she and her husband purchased about eight years ago for $260,000, would simply have to go up.

“They start by digging little trenches underneath the house,” she told her followers, “and then they just jack the house up.”

Even at about $400,000, it’s the easiest and most affordable option she has, and though bureaucracy has stalled the project, she hopes that climbing some 15 steps will soon be necessary to knock on her front door. It’d make Martin’s home one of the first in the neighborhood to be elevated, though certainly not the last: While the Republican-led Florida Legislature this year passed a bill that scrubs most mentions of climate change from state policies, the millions of Floridians affected by extreme weather events are dealing with its effects, including the worsening of hurricanes and storm surge.

Following the deadly destruction of Helene and Milton, even Floridians who hadn’t considered raising their homes are now weighing it as an option as they contemplate their future. On TikTok, millions will watch Martin lift her loved ones out of harm’s way and, perhaps, draw lessons for their own future, too.

‘Obviously, things are changing’

Back in June 2020, Martin first took to TikTok to post goofy, lighthearted videos as a creative outlet she hoped would help her cope with the pandemic. But as she noticed disinformation about COVID-19 spread, she added explainers on the benefits of masks and vaccines, making her online profile an extension of her work and a way to help others.

Growing up just north of St. Petersburg, Martin knew she wanted to be a physician just like her grandfather, a kind man who loved to sew and cross-stitch and who cared so deeply for his patients he drove the elderly to church and made sure they still cut their toenails.

Following medical school at Florida State University, general pediatrics training in Orlando and a pediatric emergency medicine fellowship in Buffalo, the only job Martin applied to was at Johns Hopkins All Children’s, the hospital that had provided care whenever her childhood friends or family had fallen ill or gotten into an accident.

Proximity to her work played a major role when Martin and her husband Brian, a chemical engineer, looked at buying the outdated, 1960s ranch-style home. Though it was situated in a low-lying area less than a mile from Tampa Bay, her husband found that the only time insurance records showed damage from flooding was some 25 years earlier.

“Maybe we have to deal with a flood or two here and there,” Martin recalled the couple reasoning at the time, “like every 10, 15, 20 years, it floods. We can handle that.”

Some $80,000 in remodeling made it the perfect home, close to schools where their children were getting a good education, a park where they hung out with other parents, and with neighbors who clicked with her family so much that they took out a piece of their garden fence so they could see each other more easily.

For the most part, Martin’s TikTok videos focused on educational content — from the risks of injuries associated with trampolines and metal straws, to why it’s unwise to try to kiss a snapping turtle — unless the excitement in her private life happened to trump what was happening in the ER. On her account, she has shared footage of everything from a “mind-blowing” Pink concert with her eldest daughter to a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Yellowstone National Park — and then, another flood to flee from.

The first was in November 2020, when Hurricane Eta, an unusually erratic storm, was headed toward the Gulf Coast for a fourth landfall. Between tending to emergencies at the hospital, Martin caught glimpses of her home’s security camera feed, where a black-and-white version of her husband scrambled to stop the rising water.

At 11:17 p.m., high tide peaked. Three minutes later, the water breached the front door.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she said, recalling how powerless she felt, stuck at the hospital while Brian helped the kids and their four cats climb onto the top of their bunk beds.

After the storm, Martin posted videos of the water line inside and outside of her house, showing the water came up 5 inches.

While the weather of the past used to help forecasters predict the chances of similar events happening in the future, the greenhouse gasses humans are emitting are upending past patterns. Already, hurricanes and storm surges are, on average, stronger and more likely to happen and will grow more extreme as humans continue to warm the planet.

Martin and millions of others are already feeling the consequences. After Eta, Martin’s home was flooded for a second time by Hurricane Idalia in August 2023, and then again by Helene last month.

“So the first one, we were like, OK, all right, it flooded. Once every 20 years, we can do this,” Martin said. “Obviously, things are changing, and we are dealing with a lot more than just that.”

All the floods were different, she said, though they did create a similar pattern: Move out, get it fixed, move back in. Repeat.

“It’s hard to remember what we lost when,” she said.

Last year, after Idalia, her family spent four-and-a-half months in an 800-square-foot apartment they had to rent as a short-term fix. At the time, it felt like the last straw. A new home, however, wasn’t an option. Anything in the area that was big enough would cost at least $1.2 million, and they worried about the resale value of their current house, which, she joked, was now oceanfront property, “just not the type you want.”

This June, she and her husband submitted plans to raise their house, hoping they might escape the next major storm surge, but the permitting process has taken weeks. On top of that, their damage wasn’t considered severe enough to qualify for a low-interest loan.

In September, Helene struck the Gulf Coast with a storm surge that broke records in several places, including in St. Petersburg, where the water rose 2.3 feet higher than it ever had before. It wrecked the intricate, maritime blue-and-green backsplash that had wowed so many of Martin’s friends, her favorite feature in the house, and it robbed her of the Santa Claus cross-stitch she’d gotten from her grandfather.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Martin told the Herald as she looked around her home just days later.

As with all storms and floods, followers from Australia to Germany sent thoughts and prayers and checked in for updates. Some have tried to lure her away. “Michigan is lovely” and “Come back to Buffalo,” they’ve commented. Would she ever consider leaving Florida?, one of them wondered. “No…maybe a little,” she replied.

The Gulf Coast is where Martin and her husband grew up, the place where their parents still live and where she gets to work at the hospital she’d held on a pedestal since she was a child. “I knew this is where I want to be,” she said.

Instead of leaving, the Martins will lift their home by about 12 feet. The ground floor, too, will be elevated by about a foot to keep their two minivans dry, and outlets will be installed on the ceiling. Following Helene, she hopes to at least qualify for a low-interest loan. Even so: “It’s going to be a challenge for us,” despite her and her husband’s well-paying jobs, she said.

As she documents the beginning of that journey on TikTok, several of her followers have already expressed interest in seeing more of it.

“Would you mind documenting your experience with this? I love where I am in Pensacola, but we flooded during Sally and I’ve been thinking about solutions,” one of them wrote. Another said: “I live in Bradenton and looking to do the same with our house. How did you find the company you’re using?”

Martin expects that the number of people who will raise their homes in St. Pete and beyond will grow, and she worries how it might change the community she’s so fond of. Already, some of her neighbors have left because they lacked the financial or emotional resources to rebuild, or both.

Four days after Milton, while much of Martin’s area was still without electricity or a decent phone connection, Martin managed to post a video of her husband watching a small alligator that must have been displaced by the storm. An arrow she added cheekily identified him as “Florida man.”

Milton is delaying her home-raising plans yet again, but she tries to keep her spirits high. Perhaps they can start construction before Christmas, she said.

“Hopefully, that will be very good content.”

This climate report is funded by Florida International University, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the David and Christina Martin Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald retains editorial control of all content.

Miami Herald reporter Ashley Miznazi contributed to this story. Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners.

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