Former Yarmouth resident and family share Hurricane Michael experience

“Seeing your community look like a bomb went off, and to watch your friends and family lose all of their belongings has to be one of the hardest parts.”

Hurricane Michael affected Snowbirds as well as native Floridians, with transplanted Nova Scotians in some cases evacuated from their homes.

Paula Ellis-Piazza, formerly of Yarmouth, now lives in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

Contacted on Oct. 11 via Facebook Messenger, the nurse, who works at Elgin Airforce Base, said her community was not as hard hit as others in the Florida Panhandle that took the full brunt of the tempest’s fury as it roared in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Her daughter Veronica Deveau was evacuated from Santa Rosa Beach, close to Panama City, which is about a 25-minute drive east of Fort Walton Beach.

“My daughter is still trying to contact her boyfriend who was in it,” Ellis-Piazza had said last Thursday. “We are in clean up mode for now. I am a nurse that works for the base and we are still off work. Patients are being brought in by helicopters as I live near the hospital. Bay Medical (in Panama City) had a tornado hit.”

The family was sure her daughter’s boyfriend, Matt Jay, was safe, but they were unable to communicate with widespread power outages and downed cell towers. She said he had left the area close to the Gulf shore and went inland with his family.

Deveau said via email at the time of the interview that her home has been without power for about 24 hours. While she heard the electricity was back on, she had not been able to return to assess any damages.

She was very concerned about Jay, who lives south of Highway 98 in Panama City Beach.

“Unfortunately, the area he evacuated to also was hit pretty hard and I have not been able to contact him yet,” she said. “It’s a horrible feeling not knowing if he is ok, but I’m hoping once the cell towers start working again he will turn up.”

Deveau was six and her brother Chris was seven when her mom moved the family to Texas in 1993 after finishing nursing school at the Halifax Infirmary. They all moved to Florida in 2005.

“All of our immediate family is in Canada, so they were quite worried about us,” Deveau said. “Hurricanes are just part of life down here, but it is quite stressful to prepare and not know whether it will hit your town or not.”

Seeing the devastation the hurricane has left behind is heartbreaking for them. She said Panama City Beach and nearby Mexico Beach have been completely destroyed.

“Seeing your community look like a bomb went off, and to watch your friends and family lose all of their belongings has to be one of the hardest parts,” Deveau said. “We have very unique crystal white sand with emerald waters here and our beaches are a part of all of our hearts, and it’s just so very sad to see it destroyed.”

Ellis-Piazza has been down South through hurricanes Ivan, Dennis and Katrina, although she never took a direct hit from any of them.

She and her husband Filippo intend to move back to Nova Scotia for the summers. They’ve just bought a summer home, her grandmother’s former house, in Port Maitland, Yarmouth County. It’s 160 years old and belonged to a former sea captain before her grandmother owned it.

In the aftermath of the hurricane the family planned to go back to the Panama City Beach area when they could to help in the cleanup efforts.