The wall of seawater from deadly Hurricane Helene forced Briana Gagnier and her family to swim out of their home on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Ms. Gagnier, who lives in Holmes Beach, north of Sarasota, stayed behind with her family to protect their one-story home, placing sandbags at each door and moving furniture to high furniture to keep them dry. They even used towels in a futile attempt to contain the storm surge.
Then there was a loud bang. Their garage door opened violently – leading to Helene’s powerful flood. The water quickly rose to their shoulders, forcing them to escape.
“Everyone was screaming and panicking,” she told the BBC. “Whatever your worst idea about this storm is – that’s what we’re seeing.”
She and her family ran across the street to a neighbor’s house, where they rescued two elderly people whose house was on fire.
She said the fire appeared to be related to a golf cart battery.
Looking around, she said she saw couches, chairs, benches and even a car passing by. Water had been sitting on top of her mailbox throughout the evening, she added.
“I can’t believe this is true,” Ms. Gagnier said. The eye of the storm didn’t even hit us directly.” “This island has been completely devastated. Everywhere I look I see devastation.”
She is one of many Floridians along the state’s Big Bend Coast reeling from the aftermath of Helene, which forecasters said was unusually large for a Gulf storm.
The deadly Category 4 storm made landfall in Florida on Thursday evening, before weakening to a tropical storm as it moved inland through Georgia and into North Carolina.
Georgia alone had 11 deaths from the storm, with at least two more people killed in Florida and two more in North Carolina.
Four million households were without power by lunchtime Friday across the southeastern United States.
Briana GagnierA man and his dog were rescued by a US Coast Guard helicopter after his 36ft sailboat took on water.
The man, whose name the Coast Guard is not naming, was sailing 25 miles off the coast of Sanibel Island when he was caught in the storm. He called Channel 16 – the marine station’s emergency channel – to call for help.
However, thousands of water rescues were also carried out inland across flooded neighborhoods, including in Atlanta, Georgia, where an apartment building was evacuated amid flooding.
ML Ferguson, a resident of Anna Maria Island, Florida, told the BBC that surrounding roads had turned into rivers amid storm surges of up to 10ft (3m).
When she returned home late Thursday, she found it had also been flooded.
“Oh my God, it’s really step two,” she told the BBC in a phone interview, before quickly hanging up and rushing to stop the water from flooding in.
In Tallahassee, Florida, some residents like Cainnon Gregg took refuge to ride out the storm. Mr. Gregg, who was staying at a friend’s shelter, said he wanted to be near the water to check on his oyster farm as soon as it was safe to do so.
He had spent the past few days trying to protect it by sinking it to the bottom of the ocean.
His farm had been destroyed before during Hurricane Michael — a category 5 that hit the Florida panhandle in 2018 — and he said he was determined to learn that lesson.
“Hopefully, in no uncertain terms, the farm is stable and safe down below,” he said before the storm. “But anything can happen.”
ML Ferguson
Reuters
