CEDAR KEY — Two days on from devastating winds churning up a record-breaking storm surge, the cavalry kicked into high gear Saturday on Cedar Key to help the island cut off from power and running water get up from Hurricane Helene’s flattening blows.
Law enforcement estimated that 25% of the homes on this island of 720 souls, near Florida’s Big Bend, had been destroyed. So there was plenty of destruction and desperation to heal in this rural oasis surrounded by a lush marsh where lines of pelicans skim the watery surface.
Republican Sen. Rick Scott was there to offer succor — and assurance of efforts for more help — to those suffering losses in this area that took the worst of what Helene dealt to Florida. The First Baptist Church of Cedar Key entered its first full day as a distribution point for those needing drinking water, ice and food. And military personnel roamed the streets, some of them checking circuit-breakers for their fitness for when the power comes back on.
Mercy Chefs, all the way from Virginia, came bearing hot meals for the powerless.
The state, as part of its disaster planning, contracts with the nonprofit. And on their first day on the ground in Cedar Key, founder Ann LeBlanc expects her organization will have delivered more than 10,000 hot meals to zones Hurricane Helene cut off from electricity. Five hundred were brought Saturday to Cedar Key.
Preparations to mobilize start almost as soon as a named storm appears on the National Hurricane Center’s website, she said.
“We’re not only chefs, we’re storm chasers,” LeBlanc said, as she slid behind the wheel of an SUV to begin pacing around Cedar Key’s battered streets.
Delivered in white clamshell containers, island residents here were offered jambalaya, spiced carrots and a biscuit. The meal was made in Newberry and then driven in. The organization has a mobile kitchen that’s able to operate in powerless places. But power was close enough to assemble the meals there, LeBlanc said.
A load of them were left at the First Baptist Church of Cedar Key. But anyone spotted roaming the street was proffered one by LeBlanc, wearing a shirt with her organization’s logo and trailed by a marketing crew filming her street mission.
Sonya Jurdy, 87, was on the receiving end of one. After giving her guests a tour of her home’s ruined stairs that she had just paid someone to replace the day before Helene arrived, the retired schoolteacher and real estate agent sat down with a view of the gulf and ate with gusto. She pronounced it delicious.
LeBlanc hopped back into her SUV and declared, “I love it when people say it’s good.”
Mercy Chefs pack up and leave as soon as a community’s power comes back on, LeBlanc said.
“When grocery stores and restaurants are open and operating, it actually does damage to a community trying to rebuild if we interfere with free meals,” LeBlanc said. “We try to help residents get back to normal.”
Spirited sentiments and efforts for recovery
Along Cedar Key’s main drag that Hurricane Helene left to rack and ruin, they were hauling their way back to normal. Suwanee Spirits’ employees were dragging out the bottles that could be salvaged Saturday, and owner Stoney Smith was looking for some product not currently available in his muddied situation without electricity.
With the noise of power generators and heavy moving equipment in the air before noon, the reality of the situation was sinking in the day after Smith watched bottles of Crown Royal whisky floating away as the water that reached the ceiling of his liquor store drained out.
“I’m hot, sweaty and tired,” said Smith, whose family, he says, has made the liquor store the oldest running business on this island in the Gulf of Mexico. “Do you have a cold beer for me?”
Seriously, though, Saturday he had an appointment with a Cedar Key building official about how soon he can open, he said. And he’s hoping it can be as soon as possible and without a lot of that red tape — or something like a requirement to raise the building 17 feet.
“It’s sad,” said the entrepreneur, part of an eighth-generation Cedar Key family, who also runs a gas station, a laundromat as well as renting commercial space in Cedar Key. “You spend your whole life on something and between 8:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. one night, it’s all gone.”
Smith, whose liquor store opened 60 years ago on the site the ruined U.S. Post Office now stands, said he’s concerned that tourist-oriented business owners like him will throw in the towel shortly if they don’t get the support they need. A thriving pencil factory was here until a hurricane wiped it out, he said. If this one wipes out the tourist-oriented businesses, the tourists will stop coming to this spot to watch the sun dip into the Gulf.
“We need something like an enterprise zone,” Smith said.
Sen. Scott: Build higher for more resilience
Scott has some good news and some bad news for Smith. Florida’s junior senator is on the phone every day with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get more, he said at a Saturday appearance in Cedar Key. At the same time, though, he said the long-term future in places like should build higher.
Wearing his trademark Navy ballcap and with his sleeves rolled up, Scott was live from Cedar Key with the Weather Channel on Saturday morning as part of an extensive disaster tour taking Scott from Eastpoint to the Panhandle.
“You’ve done this so many times,” Weather Channel meteorologist Mike Bettes said to Scott, who has been an elected official for eight named hurricanes since he began his political career as governor. “What are your thoughts here?”
After Scott expressed his condolences for those Helene has hit hard and his commitment to getting them the resources they need, he also had some good news for companies that make stilts.
“You’re going to have to build higher,” Scott said, answering the question about how hurricanes of the future might not be so devastating. “We just have to understand we’re having way more storm surge for whatever reason. You don’t know why we’re having more storm surge … We’ve never seen storm surge like this before.”
“Also, there’s lots more rain. And we’re having lots more of it,” Scott acknowledged. He doesn’t see stopping that, although scientists believe more heat causes more water.
“I always focus on things that you can have an impact on,” Scott said.
Scott also took the time to press the flesh with the locals.
“We’re glad you’re here,” said Michael Bobbitt, 48, of Cedar Key, who was in the New York Times for riding out the storm on the famed Gulf of Mexico island.
“Things are torn apart but we’ll get them back together again,” said the novelist and clam farmer.
Workers at the ready to help with recovery
Stay or go? Charlie Freeman, a Louisiana demolition worker, was facing a dilemma Saturday like the one Gulf Coast residents contemplated just a few days earlier when Hurricane Helene had them in her sights.
The 40-year-old veteran of hurricane cleanups too numerous to count was weighing just how much of an opportunity he would be giving up on Cedar Key if he went back for his equipment. His truck had been left at the entrance; he was only able to get on the island because he slipped in with a roofer whose client had gone to the police checkpoint to give permission for his entry.
Going back for his stuff, he might not be able to get back on the island, he explained.
“Right now, we’re just demo-ing the parts that are falling off and getting them to the road,” Freeman said, who’s working for his cousin’s business and drove here last night. “We haven’t done any full demolitions.”
Workers like him are not being allowed on the island en masse because many of the island’s homeowners are not here. At least that’s what he was told, he explained. His company’s first set of equipment he was working with Saturday morning, a skid steer and a grapple, got on the island before they started checking passes, he explained.
“They’re trying to give the homeowners a chance to get here and assess everything before they let the public in,” he said.
Cedar Key Mayor Susan Colson said she was too busy with recovery to talk to a reporter.
Freeman said he sees a lot of opportunity in Helene’s wreckage.
“There’s a lot of work here,” he said, glancing at a row of flattened houses. By 2 p.m., he’d at least started on two of them.
Anne Geggis is the insurance reporter at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach her at [email protected]. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Relief, but not much, after Cedar Key takes brunt of Hurricane Helene
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