HORSESHOE BEACH, Fla. — Barely a month ago, Brooke Hiers left the state-provided emergency trailer where her family had been living since Hurricane Idalia struck her fishing village of Horseshoe Beach on the coast of Gulf in August 2023.
Hiers and her husband Clint were still finishing electrical work in the house they had painstakingly rebuilt themselves, wiping out Clint’s savings to do so. They will never finish this wiring job.
Hurricane Helene blew their newly renovated house off its four-foot-high stilts, sending it floating into the next-door neighbor’s yard.
“You always think, ‘Oh, this can’t happen again,'” Hiers said. “I don’t know if anyone has ever experienced this in the history of hurricanes.”
For the third time in 13 months, this windswept part of Big Bend, Florida, was directly hit by a hurricane – a one-two punch across a 50-mile (80-kilometer) swath of the more than 8,400-mile (8,400-mile) stretch. 13,500 km) from the State. kilometers) of coastline, first by Idalia, then by Category 1 Hurricane Debby in August 2024 and now by Helene.
Hiers, who serves on the Horseshoe Beach City Council, said words like “incredible” are starting to lose their meaning.
“I tried to use them all. Catastrophic. Devastating. It’s heartbreaking…none of this explains what happened here,” Hiers said.
The back-to-back strikes on Florida’s Big Bend are forcing residents to consider the true cost of living in an area besieged by storms that researchers say are growing stronger due to climate change.
The Hiers, like many others here, cannot afford home insurance for their flood-prone homes even if it were available. Residents who have seen their savings repeatedly taken away have few choices: leave communities where their families have lived for generations, pay tens of thousands of dollars to rebuild their homes on stilts as codes require from the building, or move into a recreational vehicle that they can drive out of harm’s way.
That’s if they can afford any of these things. The storm forced many residents to huddle with family and friends, sleep in their cars or shelter in what remains of their ruined homes.
Janalea England didn’t wait for outside organizations to bring help to her friends and neighbors, turning her commercial fish market in the river town of Steinhatchee into a pop-up donation distribution center, just as she did after Hurricane Idalia. A row of folding tables was filled with water, canned food, diapers, soap, clothes and shoes, a constant stream of residents coming and going.
“I have never seen so many homeless people as I do right now. Not in my community,” England said. “They have nowhere to go.”
“It’s just gone”
Sparsely populated Big Bend is known for its towering pine forests and pristine salt marshes that disappear into the horizon, an isolated stretch of largely undeveloped coastline that has mostly escaped the crush of condos, golf courses and souvenir shopping centers which has ravaged much of its area. the Sunshine State.
It was a place where teachers, factory workers, and housekeepers could still afford to live just steps from the white sand beaches of the Gulf. Or at least they did, until a third successive hurricane destroyed their homes.
Helen was so destructive that many residents were left without homes to clean, escaping the storm with little more than the clothes on their backs, even losing their shoes to the rising tides.
“People didn’t even have a Christmas decoration to collect or a plate in their kitchen,” Hiers said. “It was just gone.”
In a country where people try to escape what they see as government interference, England, which has organized its own donation site, does not trust government agencies and insurance companies.
“FEMA hasn’t done much,” she said. “They lost everything with Idalia and we told them: ‘here you can get a loan.’ I mean, where does our tax money go then?
England’s sister, Lorraine Davis, received a letter in the mail just days before Helene struck, stating that her insurance company was failing her, with no explanation other than that her home “does not meet the subscription conditions”.
Living on a fixed income, Davis has no idea how she’s going to repair the long cracks that opened in the ceiling of her trailer after the last storm.
“We’ll all be left to our own devices,” England said. “We’re used to it.”
“This could be the end of your city”
In the aftermath of this third hurricane, some residents do not have the strength to clean their homes again, while other storms are still brewing in the Gulf.
With marinas washed away, restaurants collapsed and vacation homes destroyed, many commercial fishermen, waiters and cleaners lost their homes and jobs on the same day.
Those who worked at the local sawmill and paper mill, two key employers in the area, have also been laid off over the past year. Today, a convoy of tractor-trailers filled with hurricane relief supplies set up camp near the shuttered plant in the town of Perry.
Hud Lilliott worked in a factory for 28 years, before losing his job and now his canal-side home in Dekle Beach, just down the street from the house where he grew up.
Lilliott and his wife Laurie hope to rebuild their house there, but they don’t know how they will pay for it. And they fear the Steinhatchee school, where Laurie teaches first grade, could become another casualty of the storm as the county sees its tax base slip away.
“We’ve worked our whole lives and we’re so close to what they call the ‘golden years,’” Laurie said. “It’s like you can see the light and everything goes dark.”
Dave Beamer rebuilt his home in Steinhatchee after it was “destroyed” by Hurricane Idalia, only to see it swept into the swamp a year later.
“I don’t think I can do this again,” Beamer said. “Everyone changes their mind about how we’re going to live here.”
A waterlogged clock in a nearby shed marks the moment when time stopped, marking before and after Helen.
Beamer plans to stay in this river town, but has put his house on wheels – buying an RV and building a barn on poles to park underneath.
At Horseshoe Beach, Hiers is awaiting delivery in the coming days of a makeshift town hall, a double-wide trailer where they will offer whatever services they can for as long as they can. She and her husband stay with their daughter, a 45-minute drive away.
“You feel like this could be the end of things as you knew them. From your city. From your community,” Hiers said. “We don’t even know how to recover at this point.”
Hiers said she and her husband would likely buy a camper and park it where their house once stood. But they won’t return to Horseshoe Beach for good until this year’s storms are over.
They can’t bear to do this again.
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