The immense task of preparing for Hurricane Helene, a storm so large that no part of Florida may be untouched by wind, rain or storm surge, fell disproportionately on Wednesday to the frustrated people of the Gulf Coast, whose memories of recent storms remain vivid.
They are people like Amy Bormann, a waitress who lives on a 30-foot sailboat in St. Marks, a tiny city on the northern Florida coast south of Tallahassee. During Hurricane Michael in 2018, she recalled, the storm surge rose higher than her head was.
“We’re tough down here,” said Ms. Bormann, 45, who also lived through Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.
But on Wednesday, as she helped pack grills and food into a trailer from the Cooter Stew, the burger joint where she works across the street from the Wakulla River, she worried aloud that Helene, which is expected to make landfall late on Thursday, appeared to be heading directly toward St. Marks.
“It looks bad,” she said.
All of Wakulla County, which includes St. Marks, was under mandatory evacuation orders on Wednesday, as were several other coastal counties along the Big Bend region, the area where the peninsula and the Panhandle of Florida meet.
The worst of Helene’s storm surge — up to 18 feet — is expected along the marshy and sparsely populated Big Bend. Helene would be the third named storm to strike the region in 13 months, after Hurricane Idalia in August of last year and Hurricane Debby last month.
But Hurricane Helene is forecast to be much larger and stronger, and that has prompted storm warnings and evacuation orders in heavily populated areas hundreds of miles from the storm, such as Tampa and St. Petersburg, that are likely to be inundated.
“It’s just something we’re used to,” said Debbie Thompson, the manager of Katherine’s Linens & Gifts in Tarpon Springs, a city northwest of Tampa, as she gathered soaps from the bottom shelves of the store on Thursday. “Even with a regular storm, water comes into the store. We flood every time. All the clothing comes off the racks, and all the linens have to go up.”
Ms. Thompson said the store’s location, on one of the lowest spots on the town’s docks, was especially vulnerable. “We used to just take everything off the bottom shelves, but now we’re going higher,” she said, raising her hand to indicate waist height.
Hurricane Idalia, she said, was particularly devastating when it swept through last August. She scrolled through photos on her phone, showing an image of water inside the store.
“It brought in three feet of water,” she said. “It took two and a half weeks to get it all out.”
Before Idalia, a hurricane had not struck the Big Bend since 2016. Now, as residents prepare for the third storm in a little more than a year, they are feeling tired and frustrated.
“My initial gut reaction was, ‘Oh my gosh, I cannot do this again,’” Hannah Healey said on Thursday as she finished packing up the Prickly Palm, a cafe that she owns in Cedar Key, a conglomeration of tiny islands connected by bridges that juts three miles into the gulf. “But I had to shift my perspective and told myself, ‘I have to do this — this is my reality.’”
Ms. Healey said she and other business owners had noticed the lingering effects of hurricane damage, and not just on properties. After Idalia, she said, the local chamber of commerce sent an email outlining how tourism had dropped 20 percent.
“Since that hurricane, we lost our R.V. park, we lost our hotel known for sunsets,” she said. “We lost a restaurant. We lost three huge businesses. And I felt that loss. I still have tourists come into my shop who say, ‘Oh, wow, I’m surprised you’re still open!’”
“And I’m honestly so scared for — what does this town look like?” she continued. “Our tides are more extreme here, our weather is more extreme. I think we need to take a look at what Florida is doing. What is our future?”
In Steinhatchee, a small fishing town in the Big Bend that ended up covered in thick river mud after Idalia, most residents of the Coastal River R.V. Resort had already heeded mandatory evacuation orders by Wednesday afternoon. Only one person had chosen to stay, said Krysty Lynn, a resort employees.
Sheriff’s deputies had gone door to door earlier in the week urging residents to leave and warning them that no one might come if they needed help during the storm because conditions could be too unsafe for emergency workers.
Ms. Lynn, 54, was up at dawn on Wednesday readying the resort for Helene’s arrival. Part of her prep work was to secure burn piles of tree limbs and debris leftover from Hurricane Idalia.
“We’re exhausted,” said Ms. Lynn, whose purple shirt was drenched with sweat from the hard work. “It’s like as soon as we get everything put away, we have to put it back up.”
She said her biggest worry ahead of Helene was the high levels of the Steinhatchee River, which last year had been low when Idalia hit. Residents were told to expect up to 14 feet of flooding this time, she said — which would reach past even the elevated doors of campers and R.V.s.
Ms. Lynn evacuated to Orlando on Wednesday afternoon to wait out the storm with her granddaughter.
In Perry, a small city about 50 miles southeast of Tallahassee, Jennifer Loyd said she was planning to head out with some of her pets on Wednesday afternoon. The rest would have to stay behind at her farm, she said, noting that the storm was coming too fast and that there were too many animals for her to move.
“For Idalia we didn’t leave, but this year we’re leaving because it’s worse,” said Ms. Loyd, 41, who works at a local gas station. “Hopefully the dogs and cows will be OK.”
Tallahassee, the state capital, was under a rare hurricane warning. Sustained hurricane-force winds have not previously been recorded in the city, according to the National Weather Service.
While Tallahassee is further inland and not vulnerable to storm surge, its dense tree canopy puts it at risk of extensive damage to power lines and homes.
“Trees are deadly here,” said Jean Bates, 50, who has lived in Tallahassee for more than three decades and plans to stay home with her family through the storm.
Ms. Bates and her partner, Melissa Damelio, 42, were busy picking up their three children from elementary, middle and high school on Wednesday afternoon after the Leon County Schools ordered early closures to give families time to evacuate or finish preparations.
“We have an elder mom in the house, so it makes it harder to be able to leave,” said Ms. Damelio, a nursing teacher. “I think we’re safest here in a basement,” Ms. Bates added.
In this part of the state, where the Big Bend turns into the Panhandle, residents did not invoke Hurricane Idalia as much as they did Hurricane Michael, the fierce Category 5 storm that devastated parts of the Florida coast in 2018.
Michael McGuire, 42, a lifetime St. Marks resident, remembers how the water in his old house got neck high during that storm. He recently built a new house, this one raised on stilts about 22 feet off the ground — a striking sight along the road to the river shore.
He, his boys and their dogs plan to stick around for Helene. They will take their car to high ground nearby and wait it out with their generator and stockpile of bottled water.
The post In Florida’s Big Bend, Preparing Wearily for the Third Hurricane in 13 Months appeared first on New York Times.
