Perry, a city of about 7,000 some 50 miles southeast of Tallahassee, got a direct hit from Helene. The eye made landfall just 10 miles away on Thursday night.
Roofs tore off and windows blew in. Trees were down or snapped like matchsticks on a road into town. Electrical poles had fallen, some of them broken in half. The city was without power. But the storm appeared to have moved through quickly, sparing Perry from even worse.
One resident, Earl Swann, 79, was riding around Perry in his Chevy Silverado pickup with his black Lab, Mollie, checking on his eight residential and commercial properties.
The whipping winds from Helene’s eye had shattered windows and caused other damage — nothing catastrophic, he said, but it would add up, especially because he had already had to make repairs after Hurricane Idalia last year and then Hurricane Debby this August.
“It’s hard financially,” he said.
Mr. Swann rode out the storm with a terrified Mollie in a house he bought six years ago, a grand three-story, 1906 home with high ceilings and wood floors that he has slowly been restoring.
The power went out at around 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, he said, before the worst of Helene arrived. He could hear the wind and the rain swooshing outside, he said, keeping him up until most of the storm moved through. It was the worst storm in his 25 years in Perry, he said.
One of his second-story windows was blown in. The roof sprung a leak, and Mr. Swann fetched buckets. “At 79 years old, down on my knees” to clean up, he said on Friday.
“This is what life is now,” he said. “I should have put my money in stocks and bonds and not in real estate.”
Another Perry resident, Joey Taylor, 47, was trying to find out if his single-wide trailer home had survived. He had spent the night with family elsewhere in town, having had a harrowing experience in the trailer during Idalia. But his first stop on Friday was his mother-in-law’s lawn mower shop, where he had worked for 20 years.
Most of the shop’s front wall had collapsed. The aluminum roof had mostly peeled off. The plywood that had covered the windows lay sideways and soggy. The window glass had shattered.
Mr. Taylor telephoned his mother-in-law. “I’m standing on the window right now, talking to you,” he said, describing the mess.
“We’re going to get this boarded up for you as best we can,” he promised her. “I’m sorry.”
She asked him to please salvage her old Singer sewing table.
He knew it could be worse. His mother-in-law had running water, at least. And his son was OK. He had not yet been able to reach his father, given the spotty cellphone signal.
But he guessed that his trailer was gone. He had still been fixing it up from Idalia. And then another hurricane, Debby, struck the city last month.
“We hadn’t had one in years,” he said. What were the odds of getting three in 13 months, he wondered. “I could win the lottery,” he said.
Mr. Taylor, a lifelong Perry resident, remembered riding out a hurricane as a child and being in the eye of the storm, with his grandfather scolding him to get back inside. But Florida’s sparsely populated Big Bend region had not suffered from many hurricanes during his adult life, and certainly not fierce storms like these.
Mr. Taylor said the family would find a way back to normal somehow, he said.
”Hell no, I ain’t leaving,” Mr. Taylor said. “The Lord leads us where we need to be.”
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