Hurricane Helene has come and gone. It reached 130 mph winds, a solid category 4 storm, as it made landfall in coastal Taylor County, Florida (south of Perry) before heading inland through Georgia, South Carolina, western North Carolina, and Tennessee. By all accounts, I was fine. My power didn’t even flicker as the winds howled outside my bedroom window. My day-to-day was back to normal as of this Monday, but the same can’t be said about so many places I hold oh so dear in my heart.
I say I’m a Tampa native for geographic ease when talking to people outside of the Tampa area, but I grew up in Pinellas County, a coastal county just went of Tampa proper. I didn’t grow up in a beach community, but some of the best beaches in the country were less than 30 minutes away from me. As an adult, I go to the beach about every five years, but as a kid, teen, and into my college and immediate post-college years, the beach was a pretty regular thing in my life — spending time in the gulf water itself, hunting for shells while walking along the shore, driving up and down Gulf Boulevard with friends to kill time, or eating at the many renowned restaurants.
One of my first dates with my husband was dinner at Frenchy’s on Clearwater Beach, followed by a nighttime stroll in the cold February winter along the beach. We held my wedding at a historic house in St. Pete Beach, right across the street from the famous Don CeSar hotel. We had our pre-wedding dinner with the wedding party staying with us at the house in Gulfport, a nearby waterfront community that leans more into an eclectic, hippy vibe. The day after the wedding we soaked up our hangovers at a restaurant in John’s Pass on Madeira Beach before going our separate ways. Sand Key Beach is my parents’ favorite hideaway from the tourist-crazy Clearwater Beach to the north and is the beach I have been to the most in my life. There are countless pictures of me at this beach — as a kid, as a teen, during my college years, with friends, with extended family, in the cold winter beach breeze, in the summer with tan lines galore, in long sleeves to protect a recent sunburn, in hoodies and shorts, in jeans and tank tops. The communities located on Pinellas County’s barrier islands have been a background to my life that I take for granted. These communities have always been there, and they will always be there in the future….right?
The storm passed 100 miles to the west of Florida’s west coast Thursday afternoon and evening. There were dire warnings of storm surge for this area. Between Helene’s massive wind field and the on-shore wind direction that hurricanes passing to the west bring, storm surge was predicted to reach as high as eight feet on the Pinellas County gulf coast and into Tampa Bay. I have lived in this area for over 30 years, the vast majority of my life, and I have not seen a storm surge that bad. We’ve had many warnings of similar storm surge, but something always happens — the storm’s wind field isn’t that powerful once you get to shore, the storm veers off track enough to give us an off-shore wind, the surge just isn’t there for whatever reason. This time, the surge was there, and it was there with a fury.
I woke up Friday morning in shock at what happened in coastal areas. Places I’ve been to so, so many times just…don’t exist anymore. Feet and feet of sand buried the streets and the cars on them, pushed in by the water and left once it receded back into the gulf. Boats floated away from whatever marina they were at and piled up in front of houses miles away. Some houses saw storm surge as high as the roof. And this wasn’t confined to just the beach communities. St. Petersburg saw storm surge push into low-laying residential areas that only deal with freshwater flooding from torrential rains during a rogue insane thunderstorm. Areas in South Tampa were inundated with storm surge as well, even places that aren’t the usual “trouble spots” during thunderstorms. The neighborhood I worked in until the Great Office Move of 2023 (tm) saw 7.8 feet of surge. I would not be writing this in my office if we still owned that building. Storm surge even reached more inland neighborhoods bordering the Hillsborough River.
Bay News 9 photo reel: Helene’s impacts across Florida
I haven’t even touched on what happened further north, as the surge and wind damage gets even worse the further north you get towards the landfall location, nor am I touching on what is unfolding in western North Carolina. Asheville is a home away from home for me, and seeing the devastation there is horrific. So many places we frequent on our annual trip to this part of Appalachia are just gone. So many small mountain towns don’t exist anymore.
A few paragraphs ago I touched on how the storm surge in most storms in my lifetime have no lived up to the forecasts. I have worried since the 2017 Irma panic that an event like this would unfold. I saw major news outlets call Irma’s forecasted track up the west coast of Florida the “demise of Tampa as we know it.” Irma ultimately made her turn north a little earlier than forecasted and rode right up the spine of the state. This meant Tampa experienced almost no surge, as the counter-clockwise winds of a tropical cyclone pushed the water away from the coasts. There are even well-shared pictures and videos of Tampa Bay completely drained and people walking on the bay’s bed. Ian, also originally forecasted to be the “big one” for Tampa moved further south, hugging the eastern edge of it’s forecast cone the whole time. Again, this brought an off-shore wind. Those two hurricanes taking the tracks they did were very good for Tampa Bay, but I believe the hype and eventual changes in landfall started a “boy who cried wolf” situation for the area. In 2004, Charley did what Ian did, pulling further to the east and coming on shore to the south. My family evacuated for Charley because of the dire forecasts, including storm surge. The area did not have another dire warning until 2017. For 13 years, the area was invincible to storms, and then the two big ones in more recent history ended up not doing too much for the area (barring power outages and downed trees). Last year, Hurricane Idalia, which had a similar track to Helene, surprised quite a few people with her storm surge, which flooded streets along the barrier islands but did not inundate homes until you were much further north.
It’s always been a matter of time before the big one hits the area. Project Phoenix is an often-mentioned major disaster scenario for the Tampa region. Those of us who live here may make jokes about the Tocobaga burial mounds or the fictitious MacDill weather machine protecting us, but we also know our vulnerability. Tampa is the largest metro region along the gulf coast to not have a major hurricane disaster in my lifetime, until this year, and even then it doesn’t compare to what a Project Phoenix would bring. At the same time, we can also acknowledge how the long period of quiet storm seasons for the Florida west coast coupled with two major forecast misses have created a sense of complacency in the area. It’s been wind and power outages we’ve had to content with, not water. But, as the old adage goes, you want to run from water and hide from wind. Evacuation zone A has been put under mandatory evacuations a few too many times due to dire storm surge forecasts that didn’t happen. I would like to think I would heed the call to evacuate if I lived in zone A, but honestly, I don’t know if I would have in this storm after what I’ve seen over the last 30-something years (and I’m someone who has severe storm anxiety and is pretty fucking risk adverse when it comes to tropical systems soooooo). This event was a major wake-up event for the area. The big one will happen eventually, and we need to treat the big ones appropriately, which means evacuating when needed. Wind and power loss is a major sucky thing to deal with, but water will kill you.
I’ve been trying to regulate my time online in the post-storm aftermath because of the intense rhetoric that comes out after big storms that blames people for living where they live, for not evacuating, and saying that they “deserved it” for living in a red state. Those kinds of statements cut to the core and are nothing more than people hiding behind the protection of anonymity online to be self-righteous, sanctimonious asshats to actual victims of horrific weather events and climate change.
Why didn’t they evacuate? See above for Florida. “Boy who cried wolf” phenomenon is real, and it can be deadly (as it was with Helene). For western North Carolina, the storm was so much worse than ever imagined.
Why would anyone even live in these areas? Why do people live in California with earthquakes and wildfire threats? Why do people live in Tornado Alley? Why do people live somewhere like Buffalo, where blizzards can wreck havok on towns for weeks in the aftermath, or somewhere like Quebec, which had one of the deadliest ice storms in the last century.
We shouldn’t even rebuild these areas. Just knock them down and say fuck it. Ok, so why did we not “knock down” Moore, Oklahoma, which has experienced two F5 tornadoes in just over a decade (May 1999 and May 2013). Why did we “allow” New Orleans to rebuild and come back? Homestead/Miami? Houston (Harvey)? Panama City Beach (Michael)? Inland South Carolina (Hugo)? Pensacola (Opal, Ivan, Sally)?
These people deserved it because they vote Republican, so why even bother? Oh fuck all the way off. The Tampa Bay region is pretty fucking blue in state and federal elections. Asheville is a blue haven in western North Carolina. Georgia, which had some severe flooding around Atlanta and Augusta, flipped blue in 2020. Fucking self-righteous, sanctimonious assholes.
I have a more general weekend waffle in my drafts about how much I grown to dislike online communities in the 2020s compared to the online communities I grew up in and relied on for social engagement during some of the most lonely times in my life. The stuff I have seen on something like a so-called “supportive and embracing” platform like Threads has been horrible. This is yet another example of the black and white thinking prevalent in online communities and the total lack of empathy for anyone who isn’t exactly like them. This is my home. It will always be my home, even if I finally get that golden out of state job offer that allows me to finally move away. I hope to god these assholes never experience the shock and devastation that comes with natural disasters.
I’ll leave it here for now. I feel weird writing about my reaction when I didn’t lose anything, not even my power momentarily.
If you want to donate to the Tampa Bay relief efforts, may I recommend Feeding Tampa Bay? Even if a family didn’t lose everything to the flooding, many lost all of their food in power outages. This is an organization I work with frequently to help address food insecurity with our student population, and they are so needed during this time. Water is a major essential as we’re still in summer heat and humidity down here in Florida.
For western North Carolina relief assistance, Blue Ridge Public Radio has compiled a list of vetted local relief organizations to donate to.