Small towns in Florida’s Big Bend are most affected by Helene.

In the hours immediately after Hurricane Helen made landfall in Florida, James Pike sat in his truck, leaving his mobile home behind. He was waiting with dozens of other campers in the parking lot of a grocery store in Inglis, a town of 1,500 in the state’s rural Big Bend region. As victims sat and waited for news, trucks carrying utility linemen, search and rescue workers and law enforcement rumbled by.

Pike moved into a trailer park called Eleanor Oaks in the neighboring town of Yankeetown a few months ago after paying out of another trailer park in the high country that was hit by Hurricane Idalia last year.

“At 11 a.m. they said, ‘Get out,’ and at 4 p.m., they cut off the power,” he said Friday. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to go back in.”

For the second time in just a year, Eleanor Oaks was left in tatters after being flooded by storm surges. Trailers were disorganized and scattered around the lot, cars and mobile homes left behind were stained with mud, and the entire park was filled with the smell of sewage.

Rescue workers searched the trailer park and the remains of Yankeetown for dozens of residents who refused to evacuate. The community is more than five miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but the Category 4 storm brought a storm surge of more than 10 feet, pushing water inland and flooding nearly the entire Yankeetown area.

Instead of sparing major cities like Tampa and Tallahassee, Helene’s powerful vision struck a direct blow to Florida’s sparsely developed Big Bend on September 26. Big Bend is a low-income area of ​​the state where cities like Inglis and Yankeetown are small and many people live substandard lives. Housing, where local governments have little capacity to support reconstruction. Communities there are still recovering from last year’s Hurricane Idalia, which brought massive storm surges to the area.

“This is coming, it’s very intense and we can’t stop it,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference in Dekle Beach on Saturday. “The damage we are seeing here is a lot. As I remember… I walked down the streets in some areas after Italia and I was like ‘wow’. “You can see houses disappearing completely.”

Residents like Pike seemed resigned as they prepared to return to their campsites and homes to start over. Robert Thomas, 64, moved into the Eleanor Oaks trailer park three weeks ago. Thomas has lived in Florida since 2018, so he’s no stranger to major hurricanes, but this was the first time he’d had to evacuate a place that was still settled. The roads are blocked and we don’t know when or if we will be able to return.

“I was going to call there this morning.” said Thomas, who was waiting with Pike in the grocery store parking lot. “No one answered.”

Florida’s Big Bend has had worse disaster luck than any other region in the country over the past decade. That’s why I got the nickname ”.hurricane alley” — But that recovery has largely taken place in the public eye. Rural communities like Inglis and Yankeetown, too far from major resorts, have suffered extreme climate disasters without much government support or global attention. A year after Hurricane Idalia, Florida’s top emergency official praised the fact that Big Bend’s recovery required relatively little federal spending.

“Clearly $500 million is a lot more money in an area like the Big Bend than in a more densely populated area like Southwest Florida,” said Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Department of Emergency Management. late August.

However, a lack of local resources makes it very difficult to respond to hurricane evacuations.

Yankeetown and Inglis Deputy Fire Chief Kelly Salter said the roller coaster storms of the past few years have influenced many residents’ decisions about whether to evacuate. Last August, Idalia, also in Category 4, attracted a surprising number of resisters. Residents still reeling from that disaster were actually evacuated by the smaller Hurricane Debbie earlier this summer, but when Debbie caused only a minimal surge, Salter thinks they were emboldened to resist evacuation orders again.

Helen’s massive girth (about 400 miles) caused record-breaking storm surges along the Gulf Coast, from Tampa Bay, which saw more than 6 feet of water, to beach towns in the Panhandle, which saw nearly 20 feet of water. Yankeetown experienced about 12 feet of surge, Salter said. This was enough to push water up to the windows of homes that were flooded by just a few inches of water during Idalia.

Dozens of residents who decided not to evacuate were climbing onto rooftops in a desperate attempt to escape rapidly rising, sewage-filled water as the storm swept through Levy County. 20 people were rescued in Yankeetown. More than half were found isolated on the roof. Although both cities are within FEMA-designated floodplains, only about 300 of their more than 1,000 households combined have flood insurance.

“One woman said, ‘Well, I’ve been here 37 years and nothing has happened,’” Salter said. “And I said: ‘But this time you did, and now you’re putting us all in danger. Now we have to come and get you. Because you didn’t do what we told you to do in the first place.’”

Helene was the first hurricane in which Salter and her crew received assistance from federal and state search and rescue teams.

In the coming days and weeks, the full extent of the damage Helen left behind in rural, inland towns in Northwest Florida will become clearer. What is already clear is that there are limited people and resources available to help rebuild Yankeetown and Inglis. Yankeetown’s budget is less than $4 million, less than the prices of some homes in Florida, and its town manager is twice that of the local pastor. In addition to being a deputy fire chief and emergency management coordinator who uses a Gmail account for fire department work, Salter also owns a construction company.

“Your job is almost guaranteed here because there are so many hurricanes,” she said.