Meet the Ontario Storm Chaser Who Dared to Face Hurricane Milton

Mark Robinson fastened his helmet, adjusted his drysuit, and jumped into the raging water. Debris was flying everywhere, propelled by the driving winds from Hurricane Milton’s eyewall as it hit Florida on Oct. 9.

Robinson’s companions reported seeing movement in a car that had stalled and was being swamped by the rising waters. Concerned there was someone in need of rescue, he didn’t think twice.

“I walked out into the storm surge and basically got myself over to the car,” he said.

Luckily, they were wrong; the owner of the car had fled beforehand like everyone else in the area, or so Robinson hoped. Immersed up to his waist and with the wind whipping up so much water he could taste sea salt, he made it back to safety.

This was Robinson’s 28th hurricane. After years of chasing storms with The Weather Network, he is used to venturing into the places others flee from. Milton was not the fiercest hurricane he has experienced, but it was unique in what he calls its potential to be “absolutely devastating,” particularly to the city of Tampa.

“It popped up and got going so quickly. It was one of the fastest storms to ever go from a cluster of thunderstorms to a full-on Category 5 [hurricane],” he said.

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Robinson says his wife, who used to go storm chasing with him, no longer worries when he goes on such adventures. “We just chat. I would give her a call in the middle of the hurricane and say, ‘Hey, sweetness, I’m okay’,” he says.

Before Hurricane Milton made landfall, Robinson drove around Tampa with his team. Piles of garbage and construction lay in front of houses as people tried to restore them. The last hurricane had already caused a lot of damage, he says, and residents looked “extremely worried and exhausted,” uncertain of what the next storm would bring.

Robinson, his colleague Nate Coleman, and their cameraman Dave Hodge set up their equipment in a multi-story parking garage, the type of place they often choose to document storms.

“It’s extremely well built because of all the cars that have to go in and out every day, so it’s a very safe structure that’s not going to get destroyed by the winds,” he said.

Although parking garages usually provide protection from flying debris, Robinson still remembers when a recycling bin flew at him across a one-story parking lot last year.

“I saw it at the last second, so all I did was jump up, and the recycling bin went right underneath me,” he said. “That was a fun one.”

Inside the Hurricane

Going through a hurricane engages all the senses, Robinson says. It all starts with a gentle rain and a little wind that soon dissipate into clear skies. Showers and wind return slightly stronger, but go away once again. The cycle repeats, increasing in intensity, until the inner bands of the storm arrive.

“At that point, the wind begins to turn from something that you can hear into something that you can feel,” he says. “You’re hearing the wind whistling and howling through the urban infrastructure around you, you’re hearing crashes and bangs, things flying around out in the murk, because when you get into that inner part of the storm, closer to that eyewall, you can’t see anything.”

Stepping into a hurricane feels like the skin is being pierced by a million needles, Robinson says, due to the many rain drops hitting it all at once.

“Then all of a sudden, the winds will absolutely die down to nothing, and it gets hot, it gets humid, and there’s a smell, I think, the smell of the ocean at that point, and that is the eye itself.”

The eye of the hurricane, at the centre of the storm, is normally a place of mostly calm weather. But Milton’s eye was “absolutely weird,” says Robinson, who rated it as the calmest centre he has ever been through. It was also ominous, he said, because less than two or three minutes later, the winds would ramp up again along with their destructive power.

“It’s always absolutely awe-inspiring to me to realize that our planet can produce something of this magnitude out of nothing but heat and water,” he says, adding that after so many years of documenting storms he no longer fears for his life when he chases them.

“The meteorologist side of me wants to see these storms, and I love seeing these extremes of nature,” he says.

His two daughters support his work, but in the wake of Hurricane Milton, his eldest was worried. “My one daughter kept texting me through the hurricane,” said Robinson.

“She said, ‘Dad, I’m worried about this one,’ and I said, ‘It’s okay, bug. I’m fine.’ And then she sent me a note saying, ‘Dad, you’re trending on my newsfeed. What are you doing?’”

Robinson, 51, chased his first tornado in Guelph in 2001, and is now writing a book that will be published next Christmas to give an insider’s account into what he describes as his adventures.

For now, he plans to continue chasing storms for as long as he can. “They may have to nail my coffin shut so that I don’t get out to chase that one last storm,” he quipped.