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

In the hours just after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida, James Pike was sitting in his truck, with his garage behind him. He was in the parking lot of a grocery store in Inglis, a town of 1,500 people in the state’s rural Big Bend region, waiting with dozens of other campers. Trucks rumbled by utilities, search and rescue workers and law enforcement as the displaced residents sat and waited for news.

Pike had moved into a trailer park called Eleanor Oaks, in the neighboring hamlet of Yankeetown, a few months earlier after being priced out of another trailer park on higher ground where he rode out last year’s Hurricane Idalia.

“Eleven in the morning, they said, ‘get out,’ and four in the afternoon, they cut the power,” he said Friday. “I’m not sure when we’ll be able to come in again.”

Eleanor Oaks was in tatters, submerged by storm surge for the second time in just over a year. Trailers were bent out of shape or strewn across the lot, abandoned cars and garages were smeared with mud, and the entire park reeked of sewage.

Rescue crews searched the wreckage of the trailer park and Yankeetown for the dozens of residents who refused to evacuate. The community is more than 5 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but the Category 4 storm delivered more than 10 feet of storm surge — pushing water so far inland that it flooded nearly all of Yankeetown.

Helene’s powerful eye spared big cities like Tampa and Tallahassee, instead making a direct hit Sept. 26 on Florida’s sparsely developed Big Bend, a largely lower-income part of the state where towns like Inglis and Yankeetown are small , many people live in substandard housing, and where local governments have little capacity to help rebuild. There, communities are still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Idalia, which also brought a large storm surge to the region.

“This stuff is coming in, it’s fierce, and it’s just unstoppable,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a press conference in Dekle Beach on Saturday. “There is a lot of damage that we see here. I remember… I was walking in some of these areas in the streets behind Idalia, but it was like, ‘Wow.’ You see some just complete obliteration of houses.”

As residents like Pike prepared to return to their campsites and homes to start over, they seemed resigned. Robert Thomas, 64, just moved to the Eleanor Oaks trailer park three weeks ago. Thomas has lived in Florida since 2018, which makes him no stranger to major hurricanes, but this was the first time he had to evacuate a place he still lives in. With the roads blocked, he does not know when, or if, he will be able to return.

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

Florida’s Big Bend has had worse disaster luck this decade than perhaps any other region in the country — so much so that it has earned the nickname “hurricane alley” — but its recovery took place largely out of the public eye. Too far from major vacation destinations, rural communities like Inglis and Yankeetown have a track record of navigating extreme weather disasters without much help from the government, or attention from the rest of the world. A year after Hurricane Idalia, Florida’s top disaster official praised the fact that recovery in Big Bend required relatively little federal spending.

“Obviously, $500 million goes a lot further in a place like the Big Bend than it does in a highly populated area like southwest Florida,” said Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management. at the end of August.

But the lack of local resources makes dealing with a hurricane evacuation extremely difficult.

Yankeetown and Inglis Deputy Fire Chief Kelly Salter said the rollercoaster of storms in recent years has influenced many residents’ decisions about whether to evacuate. Last August, Idalia, also a category 4, surprised many shots. Residents still reeling from that disaster actually evacuated earlier this summer during the smaller Hurricane Debby, but when Debby caused only a minimal surge, Salter thinks they felt emboldened to defy evacuation orders again.

Helene’s massive girth — about 400 miles across — fueled its record-breaking storm surge along the Gulf Coast, from Tampa Bay, which saw more than 6 feet of water, to the beach towns of the Panhandle, which saw close to 20 feet. Yankeetown experienced an estimated surge of 12 feet, Salter said, enough to push water up to the windows of homes affected by just a few inches of flooding during Idalia.

Dozens of residents who chose not to evacuate found themselves climbing to their roofs as the storm roared over Levy County, in a desperate attempt to escape the rapidly rising sewage waters. In Yankeetown, 20 people had to be rescued. More than half were discovered sequestered on their roofs. Although both towns sit entirely within a FEMA-designated flood plain, only about 300 of their more than combined 1,000 households carry flood insurance policies.

“One lady said, ‘Well, I’ve been here 37 years, nothing’s happened,'” Salter said. “And I said, ‘But it did this time, and now you’re putting us all at risk. Now we have to come get you because you didn’t do what we told you to do in the first place.’”

Helene is the first hurricane where Salter and her crew have had any help from federal and state search and rescue teams.

In the days and weeks to come, the full extent of the damage Helene left in northwest Florida’s rural, inland towns will become clearer. What is already clear is the limited staff and resources available to help rebuild Yankeetown and Inglis. Yankeetown’s budget is less than $4 million, less than the value of some homes in Florida, and its town manager doubles as a local pastor. Not only is Salter the deputy fire chief and emergency management coordinator who uses a Gmail account for her fire department business, but she also owns a construction company.

“We pretty much have job security here because we have so many hurricanes,” she said.