Some residents and business owners in coastal Hernando County have a long road ahead after Hurricane Idalia caused significant flood damage to their properties this week.
On Thursday, fans were blowing inside Hernando Beach Seafood to help dry out floors and walls soaked by the storm surge that rose up during the early morning high tide the day before.
Employees of the business, which sells locally caught seafood to restaurants and other distributors, were exhausted and sweaty as they ripped out drywall and rotting cabinets and piled debris up outside in the hot sun.
“All the walls have to be gutted; we've got electrical problems, panels that are going to cost $6,000 to replace, just all kinds of things,” said owner Kathryn Birren, 52.
Skies were a brilliant blue on Thursday afternoon, and save for the debris piles and lingering flooding on some streets and wetlands, it would be hard to believe that just one day prior the scene was completely different.
Flooding got so bad on Wednesday in communities west of US-19, like Hernando Beach, that county officials temporarily restricted access to them, even for emergency vehicles. Birren was safe in her elevated home, but watched nervously as a house in her neighborhood caught fire and burned for several hours before first responders could get to it. No one was in the home, fortunately, but crews deemed it a total loss.
Friends with boats tipped Birren off that there was several feet of water outside her business, she said, so she wasn’t surprised to see the destruction inside later that day. Still, it made her feel “sick.”
“It’s hard to sleep at night right now when you know you’ve got this big a job ahead of you,” she said. “It’s a lot of stress, a lot of money.”
Weighing on Birren and her family is the fact that stone crab season, which starts in October, is right around the corner. She said it’s a critical time for her business, so she is anxious to get repairs done in time.
County workers have been quick to assist, Birren said, inspecting her property on Thursday morning and committing to hauling away the debris. She knows she’s not the only one in need.
“It's just sad, I see a lot of the businesses around me [damaged], but we all got the same attitude, we're like, ‘We're going to get up, we’re going to clean this up and we’re going to move on,” said Birren.
A short way down the road, Brian Garrison, manager of Florida Coast Shrimp, had the same attitude. His office walls were also lined with water stains and some electrical equipment was damaged in the floods. But his real workspace is outside along the docks, where the commercial shrimp boats he and his staff maintain were tied up on Thursday afternoon.
For much of the storm and the flooding that followed, Garrison was out in the elements tending to these boats, loosening the ropes that tethered them to the dock as the tides rose higher and higher, and adjusting when they receded. Otherwise the boats could have crashed into one another, or worse.
“If we would have evacuated out of here, two of them would have sunk for sure,” said Garrison, 54. “Then you’ve got a fuel spill, an oil spill and I mean this is these guys’ [shrimpers] livelihood – it’s my livelihood.”
Garrison was eager to resume business as normal, as the boats he maintains supply bait shrimp for much of Florida and parts of the Northeast. Storms can disrupt the shrimp supply, he said, but he hopes Idalia’s eyewall was far enough away from Hernando’s coast to prevent that from happening.
Commercial fishing workers along Florida’s Big Bend, where Idalia made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane and caused record high storm surge in communities like Cedar Key, may not be as fortunate.
“I’ve talked to guys up north, we have it made,” said Garrison.
Garrison has lived in Hernando Beach since childhood, and said he’s dealt with heavy flooding in the area before, like during the “No Name” storm in the winter of 1993. He and Kathryn Birren agree it’s “part of living on the water.”
That’s a reality the owner of Lei-Lo Tiki Hut is still getting used to. The bar and grill is next door to Hernando Beach Seafood and was also damaged.
“I just bought this place a year-and-a-half ago, and we got hit with [Hurricane] Ian, we got hit with this one, and I’m like, ‘Buy a restaurant on the water, they said, it’ll be fun, they said!’” said Myla, who asked not to publish her last name because she fears it would help potential bad actors find her home address, where she cares for an autistic son.
Myla is originally from Ohio, and said she’s used to the threat of tornadoes, but now believes water is more destructive. Like Birren, she also received photos of the flooded building before she could get inside.
“Just full-blown panic attack, I just didn’t know where to go, what to do, it was just helplessness,” said Myla, 45.
But her spirits were improving on Thursday as she witnessed the community come to their aid.
After posting requests for help on Facebook and reaching out to friends, Myla said local businesses who didn’t suffer damage responded quickly, offering up supplies, food and labor to help the team.
“The amount of support is shocking,” she said.
Less than a mile south, Kevin Bunt was putting aside his own challenges with the storm to help coworkers prepare the restaurant he works at, the Silver Dolphin, to reopen. It had shut down for the storm but did not flood. The house Bunt lives in with his girlfriend, on the other hand, did.
“There's a lot of stuff that's lost in the house,” he said. But he stressed things could have been a lot worse.
“I don’t care about the material stuff, that’s nothing to me, you know, everybody made it through.”
