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Florida’s Cedar Key is flattened by Hurricane Helene as storms intensify

Florida’s Cedar Key is flattened by Hurricane Helene as storms intensify

Vaseline 1 month ago

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CEDAR KEY, Florida – The innkeeper wonders if it’s worth rebuilding this town spread across a small archipelago – again. The mussel farmer is concerned about the consequences for both his namesake bivalves and visitors. And the business owner is thinking about what Mother Nature will have in store for them next as the climate changes.

“Natural disasters are natural disasters,” said innkeeper Ian Maki, who has lived through five hurricanes since moving to the island community southwest of Gainesville in 2018. “But these no longer feel natural.”

Tens of thousands of residents in Florida’s Big Bend region are facing similar fears in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. And those sentiments are increasingly shared by coastal residents from Alaska to California and Maine, as stronger, more frequent storms and rising sea levels upend their lives and livelihoods. Many insurers have already reduced or completely withdrawn coverage for some areas, highlighting the longer-term risk.

Officials have not yet released official damage estimates for Helene, but financial services firm CoreLogic initially estimated commercial and residential damage in Florida and Georgia alone at at least $3 billion and as much as $5 billion. That number is expected to rise significantly due to extensive flood damage in Tennessee and South and North Carolina.

A 2022 USA TODAY investigation warned that the United States is facing a climate catastrophe as natural disasters accelerate: Since 1980, the U.S. has experienced an average of eight disasters per year, causing more than $1 billion in economic damage as consequence. But according to federal data, the country has experienced an average of $18 billion in disasters annually over the past five years.

Scientists who study Earth’s climate and weather say storms like Helene are more likely to occur in the future. Unlike more traditional hurricanes that gain strength over a relatively long period of time, Helene went from a disorganized tropical disturbance to a powerful Category 4 hurricane within just a few days. Hurricanes are powered by heat, and the Gulf of Mexico has been unusually warm.

“The fact that the storms are so intense when they make landfall, because they have intensified rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico, is almost certainly contributing to climate change,” said Jim Kossin, an atmospheric scientist and science advisor at the nonprofit. First St. Foundation. “The remarkably warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico are a major contributor, and climate change has contributed.”

No more hurricane parties as the strength of the storm increases

For coastal communities like Cedar Key, Horseshoe Beach, Key West and other geographically isolated areas, fast-moving storms are making it more difficult for residents to board and depart, increasing the likelihood that people will choose to stay home and ride out the storm endure. In recent years, many storms have been so mild that people have held “hurricane parties” to mark their passage through their communities.

That was the kind of calculation Bill and Debbie Dotson made when they retreated to Horseshoe Beach in the spring of 2021. They have now lived through five hurricanes, including Helene, which struck on Bill Dotson’s 67th birthday. In a straight line, Horseshoe Beach is 25 miles from Cedar Key, although it’s a 70-mile drive on two-lane roads to get from one to the other.

Their house sits on 13-foot-tall concrete pillars, and last year’s Hurricane Idalia destroyed one staircase and damaged another. They had just had both sets repaired – at a cost of $15,000 – before Helene swept them both away. Looking around their neighborhood, the Dotsons counted at least eight destroyed homes. Idalia cost the city 41 homes, they said, and Helene’s damage appears to be even greater. The town has only about 170 full-time residents.

The Dotsons planned to live in a tent until they could find a contractor to help rebuild the stairs to their house, which was otherwise undamaged. Zoning laws in Florida are increasingly taking storm risks into account, and most new construction homes in hazard zones must be placed on tall pillars. But a few blocks from the Dotson’s house, the concrete pillars of a house closer to the beach were bent flat like grass.

“We came here and saw this beauty and wanted to go fishing when we retired,” Debbie Dotson said. “We had the discussion about hurricanes, but you never imagine something like that. You just don’t do that.”

More and more people are moving to coastal areas that are prone to storms

Last month, real estate company Redfin reported a net increase of 16,000 people who moved to high-risk flood zones last year, most of them in Florida, drawn by sunny skies, lack of snow, great fishing and plentiful beaches. There is also no income tax in Florida.

Many Florida counties also allow people to live in RVs, which can be an affordable housing option for the state’s numerous retirees, but they are also particularly vulnerable to wind and water damage. And because the state is so large, the chance of a damaging hurricane is statistically low.

That’s the calculation Maki and his husband, Darrin Newell, made before purchasing the Firefly Resort on Cedar Key. Maki had worked in public health in the Pacific Northwest for years and they wanted a new adventure in Old Florida.

Unlike most coastal communities in Florida, Cedar Key relies primarily on aquaculture – the commercial harvesting of mussels – rather than tourism. It was that authenticity and small-town feel that drew Maki and Newell to Cedar Key. Maki, who has a master’s degree in public health, analyzed historical hurricane data and concluded that on average, Cedar Key would only be hit by a damaging hurricane every seven years, giving them plenty of time to recover between storms and get back on track. to build.

Helene flooded and damaged portions of their cottages, most of which were originally built in the local “cracker style” using local softwood lumber, atop cinder block foundations. The construction allows the wood to expand and contract when it gets wet and dries out. easy to repair if damaged.

But hurricanes continue to devastate the interior. Parts of the complex are only five feet above sea level, and Helene pushed a storm surge more than two feet higher than the tallest wave ever recorded.

“I’ve bought more devices in the past year than I have in my entire life,” Maki said. “I have felt everything from the desire to run away from this island and never set foot on it again, to digging deep into the ground. because my roots allow me to stay. I fear that decisions will be made for me by consequences of nature, consequences of man’s influence on nature, so that the place I chose to live may now be uninhabitable in my lifetime.”

As Maki spoke to a reporter at a community barbecue hosted by a local church, Cedar Key “Clambassador” Michael Presley Bobbitt arrived to give his perspective. Bobbitt, a commercial clam farmer, author and playwright, says he worries that Helene has irrevocably changed the island he calls home.

After similar disasters elsewhere, developers have been quick to buy up damaged buildings or newly cleared land from distressed property owners, transforming older, quirky main streets into Anywhere, USA. Cedar Key residents fiercely protect their island’s local charm, which prioritizes local shops and restaurants, over chain stores.

But what do local property owners do when everything they had is gone?

“Every commercial building in the city is gone. And there are stretches of road where you’re used to seeing a familiar house, a house that’s been there maybe 160 years, and it’s just missing,” Bobbitt said. “And in some cases there isn’t even any rubble. There’s just an empty space where a house used to be.”

But while the cleanup is already underway, the storm’s lingering effects are just beginning to be felt in this island community of 700 that relies on aquafarming and the tourist trade.

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Cedar Key devastation drone view

Cedar Key, Florida: A path of destruction caused by Category 4 Hurricane Helene.

Building resilience to protect the future

Doug Lindhout, 71, considers himself one of the lucky ones: Although there is water damage, his row house on A Street is still standing. Less than 24 hours after Helene moved north, Lindhout and his wife were assessing the destruction in their home and on the island and trying to figure out what to do next.

“It feels like we’ve been kicked in the teeth and punched in the kidneys,” he said.

As president of the island’s Chamber of Commerce, Lindhout is deeply involved in Cedar Key. That means looking for good publicity when they can get it — negative coverage of Idalia last year caused an 18% drop in tourist interest, he said — while boosting the island’s aquaculture and other businesses.

“Cedar Key needs to think deeply about how we can limit this amount of damage in the future. You can’t stop the storm. But since Idalia we have learned lessons,” he said. “Because the more resilient you are, the harder you can hit the kidneys.”

For Cedar Key, he said, resilience could mean coastlines getting better at reducing wave impact, which helps protect mussel crops. But it could also mean a community effort to relocate the supermarket, which is in a low-lying part of the island and regularly floods, even during minor storms.

Before retiring, Lindhout worked with many computer models, and he has kept a close eye on University of Florida estimates showing how future storms will inundate the island if ocean levels continue to rise. NOAA studies also show that sea levels are rising in Cedar Key and predict that the number of high tide flooding days in the community will double in just a decade.

Because there won’t be a sudden ice age, Cedar Key will have to look closely at what life will be like in the coming decades, he said.

“It will be much wetter than today,” Lindhout said on Friday, hours after Helene.

Despite his vocal musings about their future on the island, Maki said he and Newell are committed to Cedar Key come come come hell or high water. But it gets harder every time to keep the faith.

“I never thought we’d be talking about places in the United States experiencing these types of repetitive, increasingly damaging weather events, at frequencies as frequent as they are now,” he said. “And this doesn’t give anyone a chance to recover.”

Contributing: Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA TODAY