Rural counties recovering from hurricane Michael
MARIANNA, FLA. — Haylie Byler and her husband were just beginning life in their new home when hurricane Michael’s monstrous winds mowed down a dozen trees on their property, more than an hour’s drive inland from where the storm made landfall.
They had made only one house payment and no payments yet on his new truck when Michael toppled a tree onto the dwelling, another onto the truck and a third on their other car. For four days, Byler had to climb over huge pine tree trunks to get in and out of her home.
“I have cried two or three times a day,” the 26-year-old elementary school teacher said as chainsaws buzzed behind her, wielded by church volunteers from more than 80 kilometres away. They arrived out of the blue to help.
While much of the world’s attention has been focused on badly battered coastal communities such as Mexico Beach and Panama City, Michael also devastated mostly rural areas all the way into Alabama and Georgia.
Marianna, in Jackson County, was hit with stronger winds than it has ever seen despite being about 115 kilometres north of Mexico Beach, where Michael came ashore last week.
Days after the storm, 268 people there were still in shelters, power was out throughout the county and cellphone service had only been restored within Marianna. Outlying areas have had no way to communicate. Emergency workers were still conducting search and rescue operations because many people remained stuck in their homes.
Similar destruction visited community after community in Florida, all the way from coastal Gulf County to the Alabama border, where seaside escapes give way to cotton fields, cattle and timber lots.
Parks Camp, the science and operations officer at the National Weather Service Tallahassee office, said winds reached 164 km/h before its measuring devices failed in the middle of the storm. Wind speeds could have gone higher, he said.
Jackson County emergency management director Rodney Andreasen had his own home destroyed. He said in his 21 years in the military and 18 years in his current position, he’s never seen anything like this destruction.
Andreasen said the county’s power grid was destroyed and it could be a month until it’s restored, and the number of damaged and destroyed homes is too high to even estimate. One person died when a tree crushed him in the storm and the death toll could still rise, Andreasen said.
“Our house was destroyed. We’re homeless right now,” Andreasen said as his wife Donna sat nearby. “We’re victims.”
Many in Florida’s inland communities usually don’t make the same preparations as people closer to the coast. Few evacuate, and the frantic run for food, water and supplies also isn’t as great.
Shauna Benefield, 20, and her boyfriend, Alex Edwards, 21, live just north of Marianna’s historic downtown in his family’s home. They didn’t stock up. After the storm cleared, Edwards had to drive 80 kilometres to DeFuniak Springs for water, food and gas. There was nowhere nearby to get any in the immediate aftermath.
Trees around their home snapped in half, some landing on the roof and sending his family to the basement for shelter. They’ve cleared limbs from the roof, and put up blue tarps. But they still have no water or electricity.
Still, they say, there’s been a strong neighbour-helping-neighbour response.