Repeated storms leave residents of Perry struggling to recover

The residents of a usually forgotten part of Florida have found themselves in a familiar pattern: Trying to rebuild their lives after yet another devastating storm.

Hurricane Helene, responsible for multiple deaths in the state and plunging more than 1 million people into darkness, made landfall late Thursday evening in Taylor County with winds as high as 140 miles per hour.

It was the third time in 13 months that the area, part of Florida’s Big Bend, has been the victim of a natural disaster. Taylor is one of the state’s smaller rural counties and was once dubbed Tree County of the South due to swaths of pine trees — many of which Helene tossed down.

“Taylor County is in the armpit of Florida. I mean it’s literally in the crook. So, it kind of funnels to this area, bad weather does,” 46-year-old Robert Bass told the Florida Phoenix while he and his wife, Vicki, 38, cleared debris from their corner lot yard.

“We’ve both lived here most, or all of our lives. We’ve been through storms and we know storms of the past. We’ve been through the hottest temperatures and we’ve been through snow here in Taylor County. It’s part of living here.”

Category 4

Helene made landfall just east of the mouth of the Aucilla River, hitting as a powerful Category 4 storm. It was the third hurricane the Basses have “rode out” in the last three years in their Perry home.

The first was when Idalia came ashore on Aug. 30, 2023, as a Category 3 hurricane. It was followed by Hurricane Debby, which hit in August as a Category 1. While other parts of the state struck by storms have had time to rebuild, that’s not been the case for Taylor and some of its neighboring counties.

“It’s a real gut punch to those communities,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis on Fox News right ahead of a planned visit to Perry and Cedar Key.

The Basses said that during Idalia, a neighbor’s tree fell on their pool pump house and into the pool. Following the storm, they pared tree limbs or removed trees from their property. A branch from the “one tree” the couple didn’t remove following that storm fell on the power line beside their house during Hurricane Helene.

Robert Bass said that, had the storm come in from a different direction, the tree limb would have fallen on his roof and not the lawn.

Coming home

Unlike the Basses, Perry resident Marilyn Bishop did not stay in town for the storm. She and her son evacuated the mobile home they share early Thursday and drove roughly 100 miles to Gainesville to get out of Helene’s path.

When she returned to Perry early Friday, Bishop’s mobile home was intact but without power. She drove to Wal-Mart to pick up chicken wings to make on the grill and an extension cord that she said would help her run electricity from a generator to her home.

“I could have stayed here but I’m trying to be safer,” she said.

Helene swelled up into a monster storm in just a matter of days, and weather officials made the decision to start warning Florida residents even before the storm had an official designation. Initially, Helene seemed likely to directly hit the state capital, which had never endured a storm of that intensity in modern history.

Helene featured a wide wind field and churned up the Gulf of Mexico, leading to a surge of water that inundated parts of Pinellas County and was blamed for five deaths, according to local officials.

In the dark

After skirting Tampa Bay, it turned its wrath on the Big Bend, where towns like Steinhatchee also suffered from storm surge. It left several North Florida counties, including Taylor, almost completely in the dark, according to power outage reports issued by the Florida Public Service Commission.

Sixty-six year old Perry resident Wallace Hawkins was sitting in his carport Friday morning enjoying the breezy weather that Helene left behind, reflecting on the storms that have rocked his town.

“It’s just another repeat,” he said. “There were limbs falling everywhere last night but it wasn’t as bad this time as it was last time. I mean, both [hurricanes] were scary, he said referring to Idalia and Helene. “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like I saw last year.”