Hurricane Helene leaves huge swaths of damage in its wake

STEINHATCHEE, Fla. – Hurricane Helene forged a devastating path of floods and wind damage after slamming into Florida’s Big Bend region Thursday night, submerging much of the state’s Gulf Coast before continuing its destructive march through Georgia and into the mountains of Appalachia.

More than 40 people were reported dead in four states as the huge storm spawned flash floods and landslides on its way north.

In the densely populated Tampa Bay region of Florida, neighborhoods were underwater Friday, the result of a powerful storm surge. In southern Georgia, search teams pulled trapped residents, some with injuries, out of damaged buildings. More than 2 million people in North Carolina were under flood warnings, and millions, including some as far north as Virginia, were without power.

The destruction stretched at least 800 miles north from where the storm came ashore in a sparsely populated area of Florida called the Big Bend, which sits in the crook of coastline where the panhandle connects to the Florida peninsula.

Near the town of Newport, Tennessee, a dam collapse triggered a flash flood warning for 20,000 people and forced a 7,000-person community to evacuate. In mountainous western North Carolina, landslides threatened homes and blocked major roads. Emergency officials issued an evacuation warning for residents living below a large dam, the Lake Lure Dam, saying its failure was imminent.

Ryan Cole, assistant director for emergency services in Buncombe County, which includes Asheville, called the storm “the most significant natural disaster that any of us have ever seen in western North Carolina.”

Among those who died in the storm, which made landfall Thursday, just before midnight, as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of at least 130 mph, were at least 17 people in South Carolina, 15 in Georgia and seven in Florida.

In Tampa, one person died on a highway because of a falling sign, Gov. Ron DeSantis said; several people had drowned in other parts of the state. The storm also set off deadly tornadoes: Two people died in a tornado in Wheeler County, Georgia, emergency management officials there said.

The breadth of the area so strongly affected by Helene is hard to imagine: In Atlanta, a television meteorologist covering the hurricane rescued a woman live on the air as she screamed from inside her car in the rising floodwaters. More than 11 inches of rain has fallen over two days in Atlanta, breaking a record set in 1886.

In Tennessee, dozens of people were trapped Friday afternoon on the roof of a hospital in the small town of Erwin because of flooding.

In the Tampa Bay area, the amount of flooding caused by the storm came as a surprise to some, given that Helene had first hit land about 200 miles to the north. On Friday morning, Michael Morton, 47, and Chris Grant, 49, were sitting in a waterfront park in St. Pete Beach, on a barrier island just west of St. Petersburg when the stormwater rushed toward them.

Morton, a native of St. Pete Beach, and Grant, who has lived in the area for nearly 30 years, agreed: They had never seen anything like it.

“It wasn’t like a gradual thing,” Morton said. “It was like, here comes this solid wall of water, all at once.”

Morton, who is homeless, had sheltered from the storm on the balcony of a second-floor condo by the beach. He said it had taken about 20 minutes for the storm surge to destroy the boardwalk. A number of restaurants, including one where Grant used to work, were simply “gone.” The water had lifted cars and tossed motorized personal watercraft all over the place. The air smelled like salt and mud.

The experience was even more disturbing in the region where Helene made landfall. Several waterfront towns there, along the Big Bend, were essentially razed by the third hurricane to hit that region in 13 months. In August 2023, Hurricane Idalia made landfall there as a Category 3 storm. And early last month, Hurricane Debby smashed into the Big Bend as a Category 1.

Helene was not like the other storms, said Michael Bobbitt, a novelist and playwright who lives in Cedar Key, a small community set among tiny islands jutting into the Gulf of Mexico. About 75 of Cedar Key’s 700 residents remained through the storm, city officials said, and Bobbitt was one of them. He described Helene as the most violent force he had experienced, with the devastation to match.

“It looks like a nuclear bomb went off,” said Bobbitt, who has military and first aid experience and stayed behind to help. “I didn’t even know how to conceive of something so powerful.”

In tiny Dekle Beach, about 90 miles northwest of Cedar Key by car, Laurie Lilliott and Leslie High walked down the main street Friday morning, clutching each other as they stepped over the remains of their homes.

“That’s my house in the middle of the road,” Lilliott cried out while stepping over wreckage. “My bed! I’m looking at my bed.”

High wept.

The hurricane had ravaged Dekle Beach, where Lilliott’s family has lived since the 1940s in one of a few dozen homes painted in varying shades of pastel. Helene scattered the remains of those homes along the waterfront. The surging waters had toppled them like dominoes.

Lilliott surveyed what was left, including some of her son’s Legos and her daughter’s mattress. Down the road, her husband, Hugh, asked if anyone recognized the wooden porch swing that was now tangled in someone else’s roof.

In Steinhatchee, a small fishing village along the coast of Florida’s Big Bend, Sarah Merritt, an English teacher who moved to the area a few years ago, wiped away tears as she looked at the cottage where her mother had planned to retire, now split in half by the trunk of a toppled tree.

“It’s overwhelming,” she said. “That was going to be her home. But I guess not, now.”

Another resident, Jimmy Hooten, grizzled and smoking a cigarette, held out his phone to capture the damage.

“I lost my Land Rover,” he called out to a friend passing by.

“Damn,” the man said. Hooten shrugged. He said he would leave as soon as his children were grown.

“I want out one day – I’m tired,” Hooten said. “They wipe us out; you gotta start over.”

Perry, a city of about 7,000 about 50 miles southeast of Tallahassee, also took a direct hit from Helene. The eye made landfall just 10 miles away Thursday night.

Roofs were torn off, and windows were blown in. The city was without power. But the storm appeared to have moved through quickly, sparing Perry from even worse.

One resident, Earl Swann, 79, was riding around Perry in his Chevy Silverado pickup with his black Lab, Mollie, checking on his eight residential and commercial properties.

The whipping winds from Helene did not cause any catastrophic damage, he said, but the cost of making repairs would add up, especially because he had already fixed properties damaged by Idalia and Debby.

“We hadn’t had one in years,” he said. What, he wondered, were the odds of getting three in 13 months? “I could win the lottery,” he said.

The trio of powerful, damaging hurricanes are sure to cause people to leave Cedar Key and other communities along the Big Bend, Bobbitt said as he walked through the wasteland of his town. It’s the kind of somber and sobering walk that so many Floridians are now taking. He described a disorienting amount of damage.

The homes on First Street?

“They’re just missing,” he said. “We don’t know where they are.”

And Big Deck Bar & Grill, a restaurant on Dock Street, on a road that curves perilously over the Gulf?

It, too, has vanished.

“Cedar Key as we know it is completely gone,” Bobbitt said.

He added: “I expect there to be a mass exodus.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.