Panama City Beach residents reflect on Hurricane Opal 29 years later

BAY COUNTY, Fla. ( WMBB ) – People have spent a lot of time talking about Hurricane Helene during the last week. This time, 29 years ago, we were talking about another big storm, Hurricane Opal.

Bay County County Manager Bob Majka was the Bay County Emergency Operations Center chief on-call when Hurricane Opal hit on October 4th, 1995. He said the community was unprepared for a storm of its size.

“People were going to bed that night thinking they were going to wake up to a Category 2 storm, maybe have a couple of days to prepare and to plan,” Majka said.

Opal grew from a category 2 to a strong category 4 hurricane, then dropped to a weak category 3 by the time it made landfall here in the panhandle. Residents had about 24 hours to evacuate.

“When people got up, they woke up to a much different forecast, an evacuation order, and then things seemed to cascade from there. Roads became clogged pretty quickly. You know, the evacuation did not unfold as smoothly as we would have liked,” Majka said.

Opal destroyed the beach overnight. Former Panama City Beach Mayor Mike Thomas recalls seeing his restaurant for the first time after the storm.

“When I walked in the back door that next morning, there wasn’t a roof, the ceiling, and the whole restaurant was down on the ground,” Thomas said.

Clean-up crews started clearing the roads as quickly as possible. Then all those people, who evacuated and tried to return, were met with roadblocks manned by out-of-town law enforcement.

“Some of them sat on Highways 79, 231, 388 and got locked in out there and weren’t allowed back in for hours and hours,” Thomas said.

Both Majka and Thomas said we learned a lot from Opal and subsequent storms like Michael.

“I cannot draw any more attention to how important it is for you to be ready to be on your own for seven days, for a minimum of seven days,” Majka said.

“People rely on the government too much to take care of them. It’s not the government’s job to take care of you when a disaster happens,” Thomas added.

Hurricane Opal caused about $2.1 billion in damages in Florida alone. A total of 63 people were killed in Guatemala, Mexico, Florida, up the Ohio River Valley, and even Ontario Canada.

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