Almost all of the houses where Mr. Mills lives are still standing. Many are on stilts, so residents are likely to be pleasantly surprised when they return to find things still standing. But Mr. Mills lived on the bottom floor, so the storm surge from the canal behind his house soaked everything he had into an ruined mess. Now he is sleeping in a tent in front of the apartment he shared with his sister and six-year-old son.

Asked what he had managed to remove before he fled the storm in advance of the pounding rain, he paused for five impossibly long seconds. He held back tears thinking not about what he had lost, but what he almost did.

“I saved a chest that I’ve been putting stuff in ever since I was a little kid, pictures of my mom, you know baseball cards and stuff to pass to my son,” he said. “But you know. It’s part of living here.”

“You save what you can, and Mother Nature takes the rest.”

From Key Largo to Key West, coastal homes were saturated by a vicious storm surge that rose chest-high, wrecking homes and vehicles, leaving behind a stench of sewage and the sea. The Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour took most mobile homes, toppling gas station pumps and splitting trees in two.

In Islamorada, north of here, there were similar scenes of desolation and devastation. Although a handful of people wandered about on foot or by golf cart, the streets were eerily quiet, the only noises the rumble of diesel engines or the pitch of a state trooper’s siren. Radios crackled, and rescue teams reached for satellite phones, their cell networks deteriorating from fairly strong near Miami to gone by Islamorada.