In Florida’s Big Bend, small towns bear the brunt of Helen’s impact

In the hours after Hurricane Helen made landfall in Florida, James Pike sat in his truck with his trailer home behind him. He was waiting with dozens of other campers in a grocery store parking lot in Inglis, a town of 1,500 people in the state’s rural Big Bend region. As evacuees sat waiting for news, trucks carrying public transit workers, search and rescue personnel, and law enforcement roared past.

Pike had moved several months earlier to a trailer park called Eleanor Oaks in a hamlet next to Yankeetown, after buying out another trailer park on higher ground that survived last year’s Hurricane Idalia.

“At 11 a.m. they said, ‘Get out,’ and by 4 p.m. the power went out,” he said Friday. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to go back.”

For the second time in just over a year, Eleanor Oaks has been submerged and battered by storm surge. Trailers were misshapen and bent and strewn across the grounds, abandoned cars and mobile homes were covered in mud, and the entire park reeked of sewage.

Rescuers searched the trailer park and the wreckage of Yankeetown for dozens of residents who had refused to evacuate. The community is more than eight miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but the Category 4 storm brought a storm surge of more than 10 feet, pushing water far inland and inundating nearly all of Yankeetown.

Helen’s powerful eyes spared big cities like Tampa and Tallahassee and instead hit Florida’s sparsely developed Big Bend on September 26th. The Big Bend is a largely low-income region of the state where towns like Inglis and Yankeetown are small and many people live substandard lives. Where housing is in short supply and local governments have little capacity to help rebuild. Communities in the area are still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Idalia, which brought massive storm surge to the area.

“This stuff is coming in, it’s ferocious, and we can’t stop it,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference Saturday in Dekle Beach. “We’re seeing a lot of damage here. I remember… I walked the streets in some areas after Idalia and I was like, ‘Wow.’ In some places, houses have completely disappeared. ”

Residents like Pike appeared to have given up, preparing to return to their campsites and homes and start over. Robert Thomas, 64, just moved into the Eleanor Oaks trailer park three weeks ago. Thomas has lived in Florida since 2018 and is used to major hurricanes, but this was the first time he had to evacuate from a place where he was still settled. With the roads closed, it is unclear when or if they will be able to return.

“I called them over there this morning,” said Thomas, who was waiting with Pike in the grocery store parking lot. “No one answered.”

Florida’s Big Bend has probably been hit by more disasters than any other region in the country over the last decade, hence its nickname. ”hurricane alley” — but that recovery has largely taken place out of public view. Rural communities like Inglis and Yankeetown, far from major vacation destinations, have a track record of weathering extreme weather disasters without much government aid or global attention. In the year after Hurricane Idalia, Florida’s top disaster official praised the fact that Big Bend’s recovery required relatively little federal spending.

“That $500 million is clearly traveling much further in a place like the Big Bend than in a densely populated area like Southwest Florida,” said Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s director of emergency management. . Late August.

However, a lack of local resources makes responding to hurricane evacuations extremely difficult.

Kelly Salter, assistant fire chief for Yankeetown and Inglis, said the roller coaster of storms in recent years has influenced many residents’ decisions about whether to evacuate. Last August, Idalia, also a Category 4, caught many holdouts by surprise. Still reeling from that disaster, residents actually evacuated during a minor hurricane, Debbie, earlier this summer, but once again resisted evacuation orders when Debbie’s damage was minimal. Salter believes that this gave him the courage to do so.

Helen spans about 400 miles in diameter and caused record storm surges along the Gulf Coast, from Tampa Bay, where water was more than 6 feet deep, to beach towns in the Panhandle, where water was nearly 20 feet deep. Salter said Yankeetown experienced an estimated 12 feet of high water, enough to flood the windows of homes that had only received a few inches during Idalia.

Dozens of residents who chose not to evacuate climbed onto rooftops in a desperate effort to escape rapidly rising sewage-filled waters as the storm roared through Levy County. I noticed that Twenty people had to be rescued in Yankeetown. More than half were found isolated on the roof. Although both towns lie entirely within FEMA-designated floodplains, only about 300 of the more than 1,000 households combined have flood insurance.

“One woman said, ‘I’ve been here 37 years and nothing has happened,'” Salter said. “And I said, ‘But this time it happened and you’re putting us all at risk.’ You didn’t do what we told you to do in the first place. Because you weren’t there, we have to come get you now.”

Helen was the first hurricane in which Salter and her crew received assistance from federal and state search and rescue teams.

In the coming days and weeks, we will learn more about the full extent of the damage Helen left behind in rural, inland northwest Florida. What is already clear is that there are limited personnel and resources available to help rebuild Yankeetown and Inglis. Yankeetown’s budget is less than $4 million, less than the value of some Florida homes, and the town manager doubles as the local pastor. Salter is a deputy fire chief and emergency management coordinator who not only uses his Gmail account for fire department business, but also owns a construction company.

“We have a lot of hurricanes, so employment is pretty much guaranteed here,” she says.