Caught between leaving and staying, they worry what future hurricane seasons may have in store
By Noah Vinsky
Original Air Date: November 15, 2024
Host: The historical flooding of this storm season is changing our community. But how? Noah Vinsky talked to two flooded area homeowners, to understand the challenges they are facing, and how they view the future.
Noah Vinsky: Barbara Ehren has lived in her home in Anna Maria since 2015. When Hurricane Helene flooded her house with three feet of water, she said it was the worst she’s ever seen.
Barbara Ehren: Well, the people who’ve lived on the island for a very long time said that they never saw anything like that. Let me say it this way: I have not heard of any single story cottages that were not flooded.
NV: Residents across Sarasota and Manatee counties are still reeling from the collective effects of three deadly hurricanes this season – Debby, Helene and Milton, which killed at least 50 people in Florida. But the flooding is what left the biggest mark. The storms caused Sarasota and Manatee counties an estimated $1.8 billion in damage, and some areas saw up to 18 inches of rain.
Ehren says that furniture, appliances, and many personal items were destroyed in the storm. She’s in the process of rebuilding her home, but still doesn’t know if she will be permitted by FEMA to do so.
BE: So we are in the process of the next stage, which … you can demolish, you can do that kind of demo work without a permit, but you can’t rebuild without a permit. So he’s in the process of acquiring the permits he needs. Now, the city, I’m still waiting to hear officially that we’ll be allowed to rebuild. There’s a rule that if the renovation, or in this case restoration, is 50% of the cost of your house, you cannot rebuild it. You have to build an elevated structure. That’s a FEMA rule.
NV: She says she evacuated inland to a friend’s house during Hurricane Helene. During Milton, her friend was in an evacuation zone, so Ehren said she evacuated to her house in North Carolina. Ehren is active in the community, and is chair of Save Florida Home Rule, an organization rallying against the dissolution of the three cities on Anna Maria Island. She calls Anna Maria “paradise,” and says she doesn’t want to move anywhere else. However, because of climate change making these thousand-year flooding events more likely, she says she might have to.
BE: I could not go through this again. You know, seeing all your … and we, before we evacuated, we did what we could to put things up, put things on beds and some of my … I make jewelry, and some of my jewelry equipment and whatnot, I put up high so … but there’s only so much you can do, you know? And then watching as people are taking the stuff out, the appliances, the furniture, and seeing your whole life on the curb. I cried every time I passed by the pile.
NV: Allison Werner is a Sarasota real estate agent who’s called the area home since 2013. She remembers talking to her neighbors before Hurricane Debby’s outer bands lashed the Gulf Coast of Florida, saying that she wasn’t worried about the storm. There were no warnings from the county or evacuation orders. But floodwaters from the Phillippi Creek reached up to the doorknobs on the first floor of her Southgate home.
Allison Werner: We’ve had rain storms and nothing like this, nothing even close to this has ever happened before. And honestly, to me, It was really shocking because all my house flooded. When you think, maybe you’ll get six inches of water in your house or something like that. This was up to the doorknobs on my first floor. My cars, I had two cars, a little convertible and an SUV, and both of them were totaled. It just … the amount of water was just unreal.
NV: Werner says she believes a cause of the flooding was from development of the Celery Fields, county greenspace created to absorb water and prevent down-creek flooding, as well as the county’s failure to dredge and maintain the creek. She says she emailed Sarasota County commissioners in hopes of getting answers, yet received none.
AW: I was really disappointed with the county’s reaction to Debby. I emailed all of the commissioners with photos of my property and told them what had happened. And I did not say anything accusatory. I said, “We need answers because this is not normal. I don’t care that it was a lot of rain. And what happened? There had to be other contributing factors.” And only one of the commissioners even responded and he said something like “Yeah, we’ll check it out when we have the time.” And it’s like, are you not understanding what just happened to large amounts of people in your area because of your bad choices?
NV: Werner says she stayed at her house during Debby, having to brave thigh-deep floodwaters to rescue her chickens she keeps in her backyard. She even says she said a friend kayak down the street to check on her. Along with her house and two cars being destroyed, Werner says the mental aftermath of the storm has been difficult.
AW: So, I was literally so traumatized by this, by Debby and by what happened to me. And really, I’m typically a strong person, very independent. I’m not a person who crumbles under pressure. And this storm, it mentally has been very difficult. So I left actually a couple days before Helene, not because it was coming, but just because I couldn’t stay in my house with the chaos of the construction and just seeing the devastation that had happened here on a daily basis was just really upsetting.
NV: Werner says it was hard to see her gutted home after she began the rebuilding process. Three months later, her house is almost entirely redone. Despite the physical and mental hardships, she calls herself one of the lucky ones.
AW: I had like a skeleton of a house for I think maybe like six weeks, because they had to gut everything. So, you say down to the studs and like intellectually you understand what that means, but when your house literally looks like a skeleton, it’s just really upsetting to see. But yeah, they’re almost finished. So I have been really lucky. And honestly, compared to the people like on the barrier islands, there were just so many more people affected by the other storms that if you had to go through this, it was way better to go through it with Debby because we were already underway when all the other stuff happened.
NV: This is Noah Vinsky for WSLR News.
WSLR News aims to keep the local community informed with our 1/2 hour local news show, quarterly newspaper and social media feeds. The local news broadcast airs on Wednesdays and Fridays at 6pm.
