On Friday morning, Michael Morton, 47, and Chris Grant, 49, were sitting in a waterfront park in St. Pete Beach, a resort city on a barrier island just west of St. Petersburg, Fla., drinking bottled water in the shade and trying to decide what to do next. Mr. Morton, a native of St. Pete Beach, and Mr. Grant, who has lived in the area for nearly 30 years, agreed: They had never seen anything like Hurricane Helene.
“It wasn’t like a gradual thing,” Mr. Morton said. “It was like, here comes this solid wall of water, all at once.”
Mr. Morton, who is homeless, had sheltered from the storm on the balcony of a second-floor condo by the beach. He said it took about 20 minutes for the storm surge to destroy the boardwalk. A number of restaurants, including one where Mr. Grant used to work, were simply “gone.” The water had lifted cars and strewn jet skis all over the place. The air smelled like salt and mud.
Mr. Morton said he had not feared for himself, but now he was worried about other people who might have been caught in the surge. As a native Floridian, he said he understood the impulse to stay, especially because the Tampa Bay Area had had so many “brushes” with hurricanes without taking a direct hit.
But Helene passed more than 150 miles to the north and still devastated St. Pete Beach, prompting the men to think of the threats of future hurricanes. “What happens if it’s a direct hit?” Mr. Grant said.
After the storm passed, Mr. Morton, who works in tree service, walked to the park to think through what had happened. Everything was closed, so there was nowhere to buy food or water. But if he walked over the bridge to the mainland, he would not be able to come back to St. Pete Beach, and he didn’t want to be stuck away from home.
Mr. Morton and Mr. Grant agreed on something else: Helene would not stop anyone from moving here. In fact, they predicted, new multimillion dollar condos would rise to replace what the storm destroyed.
“They’ll forget about this storm in a few weeks,” Mr. Morton said. “As fast as they can put it up, people are moving in.”
The post At a Barrier Island in Florida, Helene Brought ‘a Solid Wall of Water’ appeared first on New York Times.