Recovery Slow In Florida After Hurricane Michael, One Year Later

A house in Panama City, Florida damaged by Hurricane Michael last
year still sits unrepaired. Photo by Valerie Crowder/WFSU.

Just about a year ago, on October 10, 2018, category 5 Hurricane Michael slammed ashore at Mexico Beach, on the Florida panhandle, with 160 mph winds.

Needless to say, the area in and around Mexico Beach was pretty much leveled.  As the one-year anniversary approaches, the area is still struggling big time, as you will see in the sad video at the bottom of this post. 

You can tell some early hopefulness faded.  On some buildings, blue tarps had been placed over the remains of roof, as property owners hoped to salvage what they could and rebuild. But no work has begun on some of these properties and many of these tarps are now shredded and useless, flapping in the Gulf of Mexico breezes.

On other properties, the debris has been removed, leaving just blank concrete slabs. Other buildings lay in ruins, looking just the way they did when we saw news footage of them on the days immediately after the storm.

Hurricane Michael coming ashore at Mexico Beach, Florida last year.

Part of the reason might be this: As of July, 15% of Michael-related insurance claims were still unresolved, according to the Associated Press. 

Vast pine forests just inland from Mexico Beach still lie in twisted ruins, with a little greenery popping up in what is left of the understory.

Back in Mexico Beach, resilient palm trees look like they've made a nice comeback, but otherwise there's still scarcely any green trees left. 

The white sandy beach in the town looks inviting, but few beachfront buildings have been repaired. Some ostructures are undergoing reconstruction, but not all that many. The only fully restored and open business I saw in the video is a Dollar General.

There's still  few people around, too. It looks might many have abandoned Mexico Beach. There are plenty of forlorn "For Sale" signs on ruined or blank properties, with no takers.

Here's the video:

Are Swept Away Building Sites Gravestones From Hurricane Michael?

Dozens upon dozens of homes and businesses swept away in
Mexico Beach, Florida after Hurricane Michael

SATURDAY P.M. UPDATE

Some rather hopeful news from Reuters:

Searchers are really beginning to dig deeper into the nook and crannies in the worst of the Hurricane Michael zone and finding plenty of survivors

More than 500 of the roughly 2,100 people reported missing have been found alive. Officials expect to find many more survivors over the weekend.

Many of the missing were simply cut off by debris, wrecked homes, and cellular service cut off  by the storm.

Roughly 1,700 search and rescue workers were combing the wreckage this weekend. When they find survivors, they take pictures of them and forward the photos to worried relatives to ease their minds, Reuters said. .

Some of the stories are still harrowing, though. As Reuters reports:

"Rescue crews heard cries for help and cut into a mobile home crumpled by the storm in Panama City, freeing survivors who had been trapped inside for two days, Matthew Marchetti, co-founder of the Houston-based CrowdSource Rescue, said on Saturday."

This tells me the search is still definitely a rescue mission more than a body recovery mission, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, the death toll is still expected to rise, however.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

One of the most haunting images I've been seeing from the areas of Florida wiped out by Hurricane Michael are the swept-clean concrete slabs.

Aerial photos and videos show dozens and dozens of these flat slabs in Mexico Beach, Florida and elsewhere.

Each slab is where a house, condo, business or other building stood. The winds and storm surge swept everything away. You'd never know buildings stood there, save for those thin, flat slabs.

I'm getting more and more worried those slabs are symbolic gravestones. How many people stayed behind along the coast as Hurricane Michael roared in? And how many died?

At last check the death toll from Hurricane Michael was 17. Those deaths hit from Florida to Virginia, where Michael's last swipe unleashed high winds, tornadoes and flash flooding. The death toll of 17 is terrible, but seems relatively modest for a storm that ferocious.

But there are increasing signs that possibly, a lot more people died, which makes this whole story even more tragic.

There is so much debris and destruction in Mexico Beach and surrounding towns that relief workers and searchers are only just beginning to arrive and poke through the rubble.  If people died, I'm not sure they will ever find the bodies. Were they swept out to sea in the departing storm surge toward the end of the hurricane? Are they lost in the broken logs and sticks that before Michael were dense pine forests just inland?

ABC News reported yesterday there are a "tremendous number" of people still unaccounted for after the hurricane. Perhaps some of them are safe, scattered in shelters across the Southeast with no decent post-storm cell phone service to tell relatives where they are. That would be the best case scenario.

There are extreme challenges in the search for the dead and injured, Bay County, Florida Emergency Services Chief Mark Bowen told ABC on Friday. 

"Fire stations are destroyed, police stations are destroyed... Public safety agencies are only taking highest priority calls right now -- heart attacks, you know, major trauma. An enormous amount of 911 calls are going unresponded to because we've got this priority to search and rescue. So it's a terrible thing."

The Associated Press reported that one body had been found in Mexico Beach. But in one glimmer of hope, the AP says authorities have canceled plans, at least for now, to set up a temporary morgue to handle casualties. That suggests there might not be a huge number of deceased.

This is one of the most grim weather blog posts I have written, but it is facts, and we have to deal with them.

Here's a heartbreaking Washington Post video of Mexico Beach, showing the destruction, interviews with shell-shocked residents, all with the haunting background sounds of dozens of alarms blaring in shattered buildings: