WHEN Hurricane Helene made landfall Sept. 26 near New Port Richey just north of Tampa, Florida, Annette Pawluk was visiting friends in the Sharon area, where she grew up.
But her husband — Paul, also a former local resident — was in their condominium, watching Thursday Night Football with a neighbor. Helene’s storm surge came at high tide, which multiplied its fury.
“He said, ‘Within seconds, the water was up to my ankles, a short time later, my knees, then my chest,” Annette said.
Paul and his football-watching neighbor helped other residents of the 47-unit condo complex onto a balcony that kept them above the rushing waters. But they couldn’t avoid the devastation.
Annette Pawluk said the hurricane rainfall, storm surge and the high tide combined to carry floodwaters through their complex and across an eight-lane highway into areas that, “was never supposed to flood.”
Those words — “never supposed to flood” — might be Helene’s epitaph. The storm, leaving power outages so severe they could be seen from outer space in its wake, roared through the Florida panhandle, into Georgia and Alabama and into Tennessee, Kentucky, and North and South Carolina.
Towns and people deep in the Appalachian Mountains — places that are “never supposed to flood” — were devastated by the deluge.
Annette Pawluk plans to return home to the devastation her husband has been dealing with for more than a week. For her and many thousands of others in the Deep — and not-so-deep — South, the nightmare won’t be over for some time.
In Helene’s aftermath, it’s natural to want to help. The Herald told the story Friday of Danielle Coomber a Grove City woman who drove to North Carolina with a horse trailer filled with supplies to care for animals left vulnerable by the storm.
At the same time, we have to be wary of those looking to take advantage of our impulse toward kindness. The Federal Emergency Management Agency warns people to guard against scammers by relying on trusted sources of information.
The best ways to help are through established aid agencies like the American Red Cross (https://www.redcross.org/donate/dr/hurricane-helene.html/) and Salvation Army (https://give.helpsalvationarmy.org/give/166081/#!/donation/checkout).
Annette Pawluk said that FEMA has been responsive to her and her husband’s needs. FEMA, and the Red Cross and Salvation Army, have done this before.
Reaction to Helene has been a positive, but we need to pair our desire to help those impacted with proactive measures to keep natural disasters from being exacerbated by the acts of man
Annette Pawluk said she and many of her neighbors don’t carry flood insurance, even though they are in an area prone to flooding, because it’s prohibitively expensive.
Hurricane-related flooding has become so prevalent that many insurers have bailed out of Florida entirely. Those that remain are charging exhorbitant premiums that discourage homeowners from buying policies.
And people who live in the Appalachian mountains — which are also “never supposed to flood” — don’t carry flood insurance either.
Those people are now faced with rebuilding without help beyond the federal government, which means taxpayers.
While this might be the worst hurricane, possibly since Katrina in 2005, it won’t be the last. With warmer water in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico fueling more severe hurricanes, there will be another big storm.
We need to do what we can to harden our systems to prevent the impact of devastating storms, while doing what we can to soften the blow when, not if, it lands.
