Living near the gleaming expanse of Tampa Bay in Florida used to require a certain calculus: Fear the Big One, a powerful hurricane that would tear into the densely populated region and drown people and property. But also rest assured that most Gulf of Mexico storms are near-misses — one has not directly hit Tampa since 1921 — and keep enjoying life on the coast.
Lately, though, the calculus has changed. A rash of Gulf storms in recent years, culminating with Hurricane Helene on Thursday, has given way to a new reality for the booming region’s residents: Hurricanes that remain hundreds of miles away are likely to wreak havoc on the Tampa Bay region, as are smaller storms.
Helene, a Category 4 hurricane, made landfall near Perry, Fla., some 200 miles north of Tampa. It followed a path similar to Hurricane Idalia in August of last year and Hurricane Debby last month. All three storms put wide swaths of the Tampa Bay region underwater, though none more than Helene, which brought storm surge into neighborhoods that had not seen such flooding in decades — or ever.
“I don’t know what to do,” Mimi Wills, a South Tampa resident, said as she pushed open her front door on Friday morning and found more than three feet of water had come in during the storm. “In all the years I’ve lived in Florida, this has never happened.”
Such losses, once rare, have become more common. More residents are wrestling lately with how — or whether — to keep living in a beautiful place that has become vulnerable to more frequent and intense storms as well as rising sea levels. After leaving Florida, Helene cut a destructive path across the South, including with flooding in and landslides near Asheville, N.C., another scenic place that draws multitudes.
Officials said the storm caused more than 40 deaths in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, including from rising floodwaters, falling trees, car crashes and a tornado. Atlanta reported 21 water rescues in one hard-hit area, and around 60 people were rescued from the roof of a hospital in flooded Erwin, Tenn.
The storm surge broke records in a number of spots around the Tampa Bay region, including in St. Petersburg, where it reached 6.31 feet, and Old Port Tampa, where it rose to 6.83 feet.
“I feel like it’s just gotten worse every year,” said Kento Kawakami, a resident of low-lying Davis Island, near downtown Tampa, who said on Friday that he is ready to leave. “At some point, you can’t ignore that anymore.”
Hurricane Helene brought four feet of water into the home of Meghan Martin of Shore Acres, a flood-prone enclave on the edge of Tampa Bay in St. Petersburg. That was the most ever for her, and it came just a year after Hurricane Idalia forced her, her husband, their four children and four cats into a one-bedroom rental for months. For Sale signs have dotted the streets of Shore Acres for many months.
Mayor Jane Castor of Tampa has been asked many times why people keep moving into her city of about 400,000 people — especially to its waterfront neighborhoods — despite the harrowing storm seasons. Four of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas are in Florida, including Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, which gained about 51,600 new residents from 2022 to 2023. In all, the region is home to more than three million people.
“That’s sort of the price you may have to pay for living in paradise,” Ms. Castor said in an interview on Friday.
She spoke from her partner’s home in South Tampa, which had flooded with about three or four feet of water, compared with about half an inch during Hurricane Idalia 13 months ago.
“I’m getting ready to turn 65,” said Ms. Castor, a lifelong Tampa resident, “but I haven’t seen storm surge like this.”
The authorities in Pinellas County, which borders the Gulf and juts into Tampa Bay, said five people died during Helene, at least two of them from drowning.
Emergency workers in the county received about 7,000 calls between Thursday night and Friday morning, about four times the normal call volume, and performed several hundred water rescues on the county’s barrier islands. Neighboring Hillsborough County, where Tampa is, received about 300 calls, mainly about homes flooding, and performed water rescues that included helping two families off the roofs of their houses.
“That’s the first we’ve ever heard of that happening,” said Chris Wilkerson, a Hillsborough County spokesman. The city of Tampa performed another 78 evacuations and rescues.
Property losses across the region were extensive. In Shore Acres, where at least 1,200 of the roughly 2,600 homes flooded during Hurricane Idalia last year, Michael Childress, 51, did not take any chances and packed mattresses, television sets and a Ms. Pac-Man Machine into a 15-foot U-Haul he described as “mobile dry storage.”
His family loves living next to the water and knows that hurricanes come with the territory.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” he said. “Sometimes you can go five years, 10 years without a storm.”
With memories of Hurricane Idalia still fresh, Nancy Cotto and her family raised as much of their furniture as they could, placed their valuables in plastic bins and evacuated the home in Shore Acres that they had lived in since 2016. They had recently completed their post-Idalia repairs.
“We expected an eight-foot storm surge, so we put everything up,” she said.
What happened was much worse: Their home caught fire, likely from water short-circuiting its electrical system.
Ms. Cotto had turned off the power, but the fire broke out anyway, she said in tears as she watched what was left of it smolder from the street behind her house. Her street remained under three feet of water.
She lamented losing her parents’ ashes, which she had set 10 feet high.
“I don’t know emotionally how I’m going to get through it this time,” she said. “I barely got through it last year, and this time it’s even more catastrophic.”
Tampa Bay was not the only part of Florida facing the harsh reality on Friday that the damage from big hurricanes extends far and wide. Some 165 miles south of Tampa, storm water and sewage leaked into the Fort Myers Beach home of Becki Weber, who restored her waterfront property after Hurricane Ian destroyed the community in 2022.
“We’re back to Square One,” she said. “At least this time we saved some of our clothes.”
In Crystal River, a city of 3,500 about 80 miles north of Tampa, Anthony Altman Jr. stood barefoot in his gift shop as he pointed to a painted ruler on the wall. There was a piece of tape that marked how high the water came during Idalia — 1.5 feet. He would soon add another at three feet, to mark the amount of water that had flowed into his shop from Helene.
“That’s the grit of Florida and who we are,” he said. “It’s a tough deal.”
On Friday, Pinellas County sheriff’s deputies shut down the bridges from the hard-hit barrier islands to the mainland. The storm surge had appeared to reach 15 feet in some places on Madeira Beach, according to Mike Cannon, a program manager for the Vermont Urban Search and Rescue Task Force, which had been deployed there to help.
On St. Pete Beach, Michael Morton, a 47-year-old native who stayed during the storm, described the surge as a “solid of wall of water.”
Mr. Morton, who is homeless, took shelter on the balcony of a second-floor condo. A number of restaurants were gone afterward, including one where his friend, Chris Grant, 49, used to work.
“What happens if it’s a direct hit?” Mr. Grant wondered about the inevitable next storm.
As they sat at picnic tables in the shade, the two men agreed that Helene’s wrath would not stop more people from moving into St. Pete Beach. In fact, they predicted, new multimillion- dollar condos would rise in the place of what the storm destroyed, as they usually do on Florida’s waterfront.
“They’ll forget about this storm in a few weeks,” Mr. Morton predicted. “As fast as they can put it up, people are moving in.”
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