‘A sense of trauma’: Florida takes stock of damage after destructive Hurricane Helene

Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida overnight with 140 mile per hour winds and a deadly storm surge that killed at least two residents, and Gov. Ron DeSantis said crews are now assembling an assessment of the destruction left by the Category 4 storm.

DeSantis said during a Friday morning news conference at the state Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee that Helene’s eye passed over a stretch of Florida’s Big Bend region that has already been hit by two weaker hurricanes in just over a year.

The hurricane is the latest blow for the state that has increasingly been tested by natural disasters. The total economic costs of this week’s storm is not yet clear, but pre-storm estimates had it potentially in the billions of dollars , as the state’s insurance market tries to get itself out of a tailspin that is among the top issues on Florida voters’ minds.

Helene was much stronger than Hurricane Debby, which dumped heavy rains that led to regional flooding that lasted for weeks earlier this year. Helene also unleashed more havoc than Idalia from just over a year ago.

One Big Bend resident in Dixie County was killed overnight after a tree fell on a home, DeSantis said Friday morning, adding to a Thursday night traffic death in Ybor City after a sign fell on a vehicle on Interstate 4.

“Early reports we've received is that the damage in those counties that were really in the eye of the storm has exceeded the damage of Idalia and Debbie combined,” DeSantis said, later adding, “I pray that that's it, but I also know these were very hazardous conditions.”

That number will rise statewide. At least five people have also been found dead along the coast of Pinellas County, which was far from the center of the storm but still faced a devastating storm surge. During a Friday news conference, Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said that despite mandatory evacuations, many residents chose to stay, and rescuers were not able to save them as storm conditions worsened.

“They called for help, and we couldn’t help a lot of the people who called,” Gualtieri said. “We were just met with too many obstacles and we couldn’t get out to affect those rescues.”

Gualtieri said two people were found dead on Treasure Island, and another two people on Indian Rocks Beach. One person also was found dead in Dunedin.

“We’re still going door to door and making contact with places that we could not get to last night,” Gualtieri said.

Helene also brought historic coastal flooding farther down the Gulf Coast, damaging infrastructure that led to power and water outages, and residents scrambling from high water. The coastline closest to landfall saw a storm surge of 20 feet, which was higher than the historic flooding brought by Hurricane Ian two years ago. Ian brought a powerful storm surge that destroyed entire blocks of coastal cities along Southwest Florida and led to over 100 deaths in the state.

Tampa Bay also saw surge and high winds that flooded homes and businesses and closed down bridges. DeSantis said rescue crews were sent to some areas of the coastline overnight to help evacuate residents, and more crews are now scouring the coastline for more trapped residents.

“They're going to be doing broader search and rescue in those areas that did get hit with significant storm surge and see if there's any other problems,” DeSantis said. “Or if there's any folks that are still left behind.”

Helene, which is now a tropical storm, has continued north out of Florida and is now wreaking havoc on several other states. In a late morning advisory , the National Hurricane Center said that Helene is producing “historic and catastrophic flooding over portions of the Southeast and Southern Appalachians.”

States like Georgia and North Carolina had previously declared states of emergency. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said Friday there have already been 11 fatalities due to the storm in his state, where parts of metro Atlanta were under flash flood emergencies earlier Friday.

Back in Florida, Helene has left millions of people without power, with over 1 million utility customer accounts still offline as of Friday afternoon. Helene largely spared Tallahassee despite concerns that its track could place the Capital City on the most dangerous side of the storm. Still more than 53,000 accounts are without power in the state capital, and some smaller, less populated counties in the storm’s path were reporting near-total outages Friday.

More than 1 million accounts had already been restored before the storm made landfall just after 11 p.m., DeSantis said. He expects the thousands of linemen that had been assembled by the state Division of Emergency Management to quickly bring the state back online.

The sunny skies that followed the fast-moving Helene provided the first clear look at the destruction left behind, even beyond the Big Bend. In a post on X , the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office also posted pictures of cars, docks and buildings ravaged by flooding.

“Sights from Madeira Beach. Debris, displaced cars, burst pipes. It is almost unrecognizable,” the post said .

DeSantis said much of the work from recovery efforts made after Debby and Idalia have now been upended by Helene. Many of the counties hit by the latest storm are defined by the state as “fiscally constrained” based on economic conditions and property tax revenue.

“I think it is a sense of trauma for the community,” DeSantis said. “I think it's a sense, I think there's a demoralization, because it's like, okay, we worked all this, and then now we could potentially be worse off than we were even before.”