Residents of Dixie County watched in disbelief as Hurricane Helene approached Florida’s Gulf Coast on Thursday afternoon.
Before them was a sprawling, fast-moving Category 3, with storm surge potential as high as 20 feet. Put simply, it was one of the most destructive cyclones the region had faced in decades.
And that’s saying something.
Dixie County, and much of the rest of Florida’s surrounding Big Bend region, has been struck by three hurricanes in the past 13 months. Two of them — Helene this week and Idalia in 2023 — were major storms.
“This one is like none we’ve ever seen before,” said Mandy Lemmermen, a battalion chief and public information officer with Dixie County Fire Rescue. “I thought I’d never say that after Idalia.”
Now, coastal communities across the Big Bend are finding themselves rebuilding for the third time in just over a year. Many of them are still dealing with unfinished repairs from hurricanes Idalia and Debby, which struck the same region in August of this year.
In Dixie County, a public dock and several bathhouses destroyed by Idalia are still in need of repairs, according to Lemmermen. And numerous residents are still rebuilding after their homes were destroyed last year.
In total, Dixie County has received $582,351 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for repairs from Idalia.
Meanwhile, the county completed its debris cleanup from Hurricane Debby just a few days ago.
“This Monday was the last day they made the complete round throughout the county,” Lemmermen said. “Turn around and here we are.”
Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane just after 11 p.m. EDT on Thursday near the town of Perry in the Big Bend, triggering life-threatening storm surge and floods. An unusually large and fast-moving storm, with a windfield extending as far as 275 miles from its center, strong winds and heavy rains were pushing across the state and into Georgia before the storm officially made landfall.
About 1.2 million homes and businesses in Florida were without power at 6:30 a.m. EDT on Friday, along with more than 880,000 in Georgia, about 635,000 in South Carolina and over 200,000 in North Carolina, according to the tracking site PowerOutage.us.
Many of Florida's coastal counties left reeling Thursday were still coping with the aftermath of other disasters when Helene struck.
Hurricane Debby struck the Big Bend as a Category 1 in August less than 50 miles from the place where Helene made landfall, saddling many of the same counties with floods, power outages and debris.
Just a year ago, in August 2023, Hurricane Idalia hit the same area as a Category 4. It was the strongest storm to strike that region of Florida in more than a century, causing at least $3.6 billion in damages, mostly in the Big Bend. Hurricane Helene surpassed it as the strongest storm ever to strike that region of the Big Bend.
Many of the same counties affected by Idalia were hit by Debby just a year later. Twenty-seven Florida counties received assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for the impacts of both hurricanes Idalia and Debby, including Dixie County.
Yet some of the damages from both storms still have not been addressed, including lingering repairs from Idalia more than a year ago. So far, FEMA has spent just $3 million on long-term rebuilding projects in Florida related to Idalia.
“Any time you have back-to-back hurricanes, the roads, bridges, utilities that are being fixed — it’s just going to get another strain,” said Andrew Morgan, an acting public information officer for Taylor County in Florida’s Big Bend. “If it’s not finished yet, there's nothing you can really do at this time. It’s pretty unfortunate.”
Taylor County is no exception, he added. While Morgan couldn’t provide an exact number of outstanding projects from Debby and Idalia, “there were a lot of projects in the works,” he said. “And obviously we won’t be able to get those finished in time.”
Meanwhile, Hurricane Helene is likely to rank among Florida’s costliest disasters on record. The reinsurance broker Gallagher Re has estimated the storm could cause insured losses totaling between $3 billion and $6 billion.
Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for nearly two dozen counties in Florida as Helene approached the coast Thursday afternoon. In Dixie County, successful evacuations were a bright spot in the hurricane preparations. Evacuation turnout was much greater this time, compared with Hurricane Idalia last year, Lemmermen said.
While the reasons are unclear, Helene’s destructive potential combined with the memory of other recent storms, may have played a role.
Yet some community members still declined to evacuate, Lemmermen added. And even those who did can’t be sure of what they’ll be returning to.
“Seeing the devastation from Idalia was heartbreaking — but now to know that this is gonna be even worse is all over again a different kind of heartbreak,” Lemmermen said. “We’re a small little community, but we’re very close, and it's heartbreaking for those that lost it to know that they've worked hard to try to rebuild everything and there’s a good possibility that they might lose it again.”
Reporter Thomas Frank contributed.
