Coming up on southwest Florida In Focus.

Hurricane Helene storm surge swamped Florida.

Many neighbors and business owners still recovering from Hurricane Ian are dealing with destruction all over again.

From the science behind the surge to dealing with the trauma of another destructive storm.

We have an in-depth look at how Southwest Florida is coping that's coming up next on WCCO.

You're watching Southwest Florida In Focus.

Coming up, hurricane Helene storm surge caught much of southwest Florida off guard.

People fled their homes.

Others had to be rescued.

Even more are cleaning up the damage.

Find out what Florida Emergency Management is doing to help the most vulnerable areas, plus Helene hi Just days before the second anniversary of Hurricane Ian, some people who lost everything are facing another round of rebuilding.

We look at the trauma that's caused and how to address mental health after the storm, and hope after the hurricane.

Meet the helpers who are pitching in to serve others.

Hello, I'm Sandra Viktorova.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Well, a week after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida's Big Bend, people from southwest Florida to the Carolinas will be dealing with recovery for a long time here in southwest Florida.

Barrier islands and low lying areas took the brunt of the storm surge.

Photojournalist Andrew Melendez and I met people in Charlotte and Sarasota counties who had to flee as the water rose.

Worse than Hurricane Ian.

That's how many residents and business owners describe Helene's impact on Inglewood Beach.

Folks out on Manasota Key say they didn't expect the water to climb so high or so fast.

Mike Atamanchuk is the owner from the Lock and Key restaurant across the street from the Gulf.

We have been here for almost 30 years now and we have never, not one time, had water that has made its way into the building here from a storm or any kind of storm surge.

It was an eye opener.

It doesn't matter if they're hitting you.

There are 150 miles off the coast.

We just don't take it for granted.

We all just want to get back up and get back our feet.

Even for this gopher tortoise, Inglewood Beach seemed like a very different place after Helene.

The animals seem displaced, trying to find its way across the massive amounts of sand pushed across the boardwalk and surrounding areas In neighboring Sarasota County, Helenes damage was heartbreakin as well.

Homes in this Venice community near the Myakka River, sat in water for about two days.

That neighborhood got flooded during Hurricane Debbie in August, and they'll have to deal with repairs again.

Here's resident Gina Garcia.

What is your house look like?

About four feet of water went in it.

My refrigerator was tossed.

All my furniture was moved around.

My pool was black and I had to kayak to my house.

And there's still water in it.

These homes sit in a flood zone.

Impact here means Garcia will move with her elderly mother to a home in Northport.

She's 86 years old, and I can't put her through this.

For Lori Davis and her husband, it's cleaning up after the sixth flood they've experienced since buying the home in 2021.

Im speechless.

It's like again and again we have to keep buying stuff.

Just buy new clothes that just been able to survive.

Im so tired of going through this and Losing everything.

Davis says her hope now is that the federal government will help pay to raise her home permanently, so she doesn't have to worry about flood waters again.

It doesn't make any sense to just keep pouring out money.

We've already had all the contractor estimates and the land surveys done, but of course they're just slow, slow, slow.

36in.

36in.

More than 100 people in the U.S. died from Hurricane Helene.

In Florida, The death toll is at 13.

At least 11 of those people died in Pinellas County.

The majority of them drowned.

People say the destruction so far away from Helene's landfall caught them off guard.

I spoke with Florida's emergency management division about why.

Joining us now is Kevin Guthrie, the executive director of the Division of Emergency Management for the State of Florida.

Mr. Guthrie, welcome.

We have seen hundreds of rescues in Southwest Florida.

Folk saying they just didn't think it was going to be that bad because they weren't expecting a direct hit.

Did you hear similar stories, folks having to be rescued and traveling up and down the state of Florida?

You know, everybody thought this was just a, again, a North Florida, Big Bend, Taylor County, Jefferson County, Leon County type hit and people certainly.

And we were saying the entire time, do not sleep on the storm surge.

There are watches and warnings for storm surge from Apalachicola Bay.

All the way down to the keys.

And, you know, county emergency operation centers, they activated most of them, ordered evacuations for coastal county areas and low lying areas.

So they were doing what they were supposed to be doing.

But a lot of people did not heed those warnings.

I think one of the things that's fundamental is maybe the why behind that is they don't believe the storm surge warnings.

Maybe.

And what I would like to say is that's been an experimental product in the past, but it is now an actual production product.

It started about 2017, but over the years has gotten better and better and better.

I will tell you what the National Hurricane Center forecasted for storm surge all along Florida's West coast actually came to fruition.

And now there's hundreds of thousands of believers that actually believe in.

So since you mention that, I will tell you, I spoke with a business owner, and a homeowner.

She she basically had 3 to 4ft of water in her home and in her business.

She lives out on Inglewood Beach in Charlotte County.

And she said she heard the everybody was predicting this 3 to 4ft surge.

And they just she says I guess they told me and I just maybe didn't believe it.

She of course will see that warning next time.

But she said they didn't decide to leave their home out on Inglewood Beach till they started seeing the water come up their driveway.

And then they had, you know, in a truck, not sure whether they were going to be able to get out because they had water coming in from lemon Bay and from the Gulf.

What do you want folks to think about for the next one, as far as preparing and coming up with a plan for a storm?

So what I want them to prepare for is, number one, have their preparedness kit.

But what I want them to plan for, which is a step before that, is what is my decision point to leave.

Is it a storm surge warning?

Most people don't have that on their bingo card at all.

They have a hurricane.

They don't have storm surge warning.

So again, while the coast was showing north central Florida, storm surge warnings were all the way up to the western Gulf Coast.

So what we want them to do is make some decisions.

It is not 1 to 3ft of coming up.

Your driveway is, as you mentioned, here in the Inglewood case.

That's 1 to 3ft coming up around them.

And if they're on a barrier island that's coming up in the back bay, that's coming up on the Gulf side.

So as they're starting to leave to their point, it may not be able to be a situation where I can actually get out of harm's way.

That decision point has got to be well ahead of the actual action happening.

So again, it's always better to go ahead and leave.

You can come back, but if you're there, we don't want you to drown, as some people did in the in the southern state of Florida.

6 or 7 people have drowned, but we don't want to have that happen.

Those are completely preventable deaths.

Mr. Guthrie, I know your team is respected nationally.

You're constantly working to improve how you do your job in both preparing and responding to a storm.

But there are so many people who have been through flooding they've lost perhaps their belongings twice.

Three times.

Is this sustainable for some of these most vulnerable communities, both for some of these communities and really for the state of Florida, to spend the resources on this?

again, Florida experiences a lot of tourism and our budget is very, very healthy.

And for the short term, certainly it is sustainable.

You know, we want people now and you're you're hearing it here are first, in essence, you know, we would like for more people to get involved in our mitigation and elevation program and what we also call our mitigation reconstruction program.

These are federal dollars that come into communities at the homeowner level that will help them elevate their home, will help them reconstruct their home.

And the federal grant is 75%, so they're only having to come out of pocket $0.25 on the dollar.

To, to get this, construction work done.

So we are looking forward in this particular disaster of really trying to put a lot of emphasis and focus on the mitigation of mitigation elevation program in the mitigation reconstruction program to build back stronger and even more so in this case, elevate those properties.

All right.

We will make sure that we get that information to our viewers.

Thank you so much, Mr. Guthrie, for your time.

We truly appreciate it.

But thank you.

Homeowners and businesses are still cleaning up on Fort Myers Beach after storm surge inundated a sterile island.

Many of these same places are still recovering from Hurricane Ian's destruction.

Who was there as the water rose during clean water, poured around barriers and filled the streets?

And here's an overhead perspective of how Hurricane Helene changed Florida's entire West coast.

The picture on the left shows before the storm.

The one on the right shows the sediment that washed into the Gulf after Helene passed.

That sediment stretches for miles.

FGCUs Water School is researchi how storm surge is affecting our community and our coastline.

We spoke with a professor about his work.

Joining us now is Chris Daly, an assistant professor of coastal geomorphology at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Welcome, professor.

Thank you for your time.

Thanks, Sandra, for inviting me.

So you study how shorelines change, how our world changes.

You know, there were so many folks in Charlotte in in Sarasota counties who say that they had lived there for decades and they've never seen flooding like this.

And they worry.

Is this something that they need to, you know, prepare for on a regular basis now?

you know, with, with changing climate and more frequent storms, especially these storms that come along our coast, we are going to see these changes, over time.

So you studied the storm surge with Hurricane Ian.

What did you find in your research?

And what are the big takeaways from from what you found?

Well, Hurricane Ian was, in some ways, really devastating storm on one hand, but, it showed us the vulnerabilities in different areas.

For example, in Sanibel.

We found a lot of, what we call web search channels that formed as the storm surge swept inland.

And then as the storm moved further away than that water that came in had to flow back out.

And that created a lot of erosion on the on the beach there.

However, Sanibel is more of a natural area on areas like Fort Myers Beach, which is more developed and built up.

We saw a little bit of difference, for example, in the Times Square area where we have some of those seawalls.

We had erosion in front of those seawalls.

And the beaches also more narrow there.

when we look at, Debbie and Helene passing by, we didn't have such a high storm surge compared to Ian.

Sure.

Right.

But still enough that we have a lot of erosion on the beach.

We still have these, kind of flattening of the beach profile.

We see that really up and down the coast.

So you don't need to be in the eye of the storm to have these impacts.

As long as there is a storm passing relatively nearby, with a strong enough intensity, we will see these impacts as a going forward.

So a lot of folks have been talking to us about really wanting to raise their homes.

We see communities putting out barriers.

Not a cheap solution.

Certainly a lot of money to be spent.

Is this a practical solution?

And will it really make our communities safer?

I think what is currently being done is, you know, a lot of beach nourishment.

So Fort Myers Beach is currently nourishing or nourishing the beach after Ian.

So that nourishment gives us a bit of a buffer.

Right.

So we have that sand, and that sand is there to help, reduce that wave energy.

Even for events like, Debbie and, Helene.

Without that wide beach, then the surge can really come in a bit more.

Now, it's difficult to really prevent the surge from coming in because we can't build a wall along the entire coast.

It's too expensive.

So one of the best things that we could do is to try and adapt.

Right.

So by raising, our, buildings and infrastructure.

By making things more flood proof water resistant.

It's I think we will begin to see a a bit more of these events happening in future.

So we need to kind of be, increase our resilience, to these events, coming forward.

Professor Daly, we thank you so much for your time.

The Punta Gorda Police Departmen Hurricane Helene brought an estimated 6 to 8ft of surge into parts of Charlotte County.

Hundreds of people and pets were rescued throughout the morning on Friday, September 27th.

The water remained high even after Helene past North homes in Punta Gorda.

Historic downtown were flooded with several feet of water.

People tried to gather belongings they left behind and clean up what they could.

We spoke with one woman who returned to her home on Melbourne Street after she was rescued from her roof.

We had to evacuate the house because it was getting up to waist deep.

I'm a diabetic.

I was having to keep all my insulin and my devices out of the water.

So we put everything in coolers and backpacks, and we took them over to our next door neighbor Bob's house.

He's out of town.

All of a sudden, we're standing on top of his dining room table.

Then we got up on the roof, and then I started calling EMS, and they told us they couldn't come get us for a while because there was two house fires down the street.

We had to send my uncle over and get our kayaks that were inside the pool cage and put my bags and my insulin on it, and we had to kayak to the circle K to where the police were because they couldn't get in here to us.

Our other neighbor, her husband's in the hospital, her and her disabled son.

They were on the roof too.

They had to.

They had to walk out of here.

And it was it was very, very scary.

Well, we can hear the trauma in Rebecca miller's voice, and she is certainly not alone.

People say the storm, along with memories of Hurricane Ian, have stressed them and worried them.

Licensed social worker and Fgcu professor of relevant, Hara recently joined me to talk about restoring our mental health after the storm.

Welcome, Ariela.

We appreciate you joining us right now.

Thank you so much for having me.

So in some communities, there is so much despair and anguish.

I met a young lady and a line who was waiting for food, yesterday, actually.

And she was basically in her car with everything she owned.

She said she was gonna have to sleep in her car because her a place she was staying got flooded out.

It was her and her dog.

And she said, I'm just so anxious.

I don't know what to do.

I'm going to the doctor.

What is your message to people who I mean, they've been through this before.

They've lost so much.

What do we do with so much anguish and despair right now?

Yeah, I think there was a lot of messaging, from individuals that I've come across as well, where, you know, the threat of a hurricane coming, even though we weren't getting the direct impact, was very real to them, specifically because it also fell around the anniversary of Hurricane Ian.

And it was a similar track.

And so people were kind of feeling like it was deja vu, with the anxiety and despair feeling.

I think normalizing that for somebody, allowing them to have someone to vent to.

You mentioned she went to the doctor.

A lot of people go to a doctor as their primary, even like their primary care doctor, mostly because that's their comfortability level.

She's they probably already have some type of established care with them.

And so they're a little bit more comfortable kind of going to them and connecting with them.

But if someone's looking for ongoing support, it might be helpful to reach out to any type of mental health professional to be able to kind of process and understand how to cope with the anxiety and the fear that they experience throughout the time.

And so, it could be identifying like different grounding techniques.

It could be talking about how to validate somebody's feelings.

Like if you come across somebody who's experiencing anxiety, validating your feelings because ultimately there is a lot of anxiety surrounding the unknown pieces of it.

Given that maybe someone has experienced such dramatic effects of a hurricane.

So you're saying if you feel like the place to go is the doctor, that's a good start.

Absolutely.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

As far as what we can do to talk to loved ones, maybe we're doing okay, but maybe a neighbor, maybe, you know, a family member has lost a lot.

What do we say to them?

And at what point do we say, you know, you might need some extra support right now?

I think just checking in on them.

How are you doing?

Right.

Something as simple as how are you doing opens up the conversation for someone to really express it.

If people say, I'm fine, it's really just like, you know, is there any way that I can support you in this process?

We may not always be able to financially support somebody, but we can emotionally support them.

And that's free, right?

And so we can reach out and say, you know, what do you need for me to help support the process?

If there's someone I can call to connect you with this or some type of resource I can help locate you with, is it that I can help clean up your house with you and, you know, get rid of some of the standing water?

Checking in on people I have, actually a friend who lives up in the North Carolina area, and I reach out to her, like, how are you doing?

Just thinking about you, you know, letting people know that there's someone out there who's, you know, wondering how they're doing financially.

Some people may say they may be in despair and realize that they do have an issue, but they're thinking about finances I can't afford a counselor or a therapist.

Are there places they can go for help?

So 201 is a great resource.

Contacting them, they can help connect them to social services.

But applying for any type of disaster benefits that they may qualify for.

So FEMA, you know, if, if they're applicable for that, applying for any type of assistance, reaching out to maybe credit card holders sometimes a lot of the times the different agencies will work with you if you've been through a natural disaster, or specifically if there's a state of emergency in the area.

So just trying to connect the pieces to reach out where you can get support, in what areas?

There is a fear amongst a lot of people that this isn't just, you know, a recent event that it may happen again and again.

How does one manage that fear and that anxiety?

What can we do for ourselves and our families?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a it's a realistic fear, right?

We live in an area that, you know, unfortunately is prone to hurricanes.

And so I think thinking about how do we manage and cope moving forward is talking to someone that we can, you know, kind of confide in and talk about maybe some of our thoughts, our processes, making sure that we feel secure in the process, too.

Anxiety a lot of the times comes from the fear of the unknown and there's a lot of unknown with these storms.

We don't know.

And they tell us every storm is very different.

And so even something, as you know, a little bit less catastrophizing, it's like a tropical storm can infect and maybe inflict like the same fear as a category four hurricane, given whatever someone's personal circumstances.

And so I think, you know, thinking about how do you feel like you have someone to process on Lean On, do you feel, supported?

Do you feel prepared?

Do you feel like you've done everything you can do to prepare?

But also if you feel like you need some additional support, reaching out to a professional.

So to kind of process through some of the different anxieties and learn different coping skills, strategies, some really helpful ones are like grounding techniques in mindful meditation.

Sure.

One real quick.

Yeah.

So grounding one, is going through the senses.

And so, you know, five things.

You can see four things you can hear, you know, kind of going through all those different pieces of it.

With some of the littler kids we like to play, I of like, let's play I spy with our self and let's go through the color of the rainbow, find something red in the room, find something orange, find something yellow, and kind of go through that.

And the idea is to re concentrate your thoughts onto something else, rather than like the racing thoughts of some of the distressing, things that you may be thinking about.

Any final message of hope you can share with us?

I think you know, don't be afraid to reach out for support.

I think there's a lot of people that feel like, you know, I didn't have it as bad as some other people But I think reaching out and really talking about it, you'll find that there's a lot of support, especially in the community.

We kind of all stick together.

I think we saw that with hurricane, and we all kind of came together and rallied together.

And I think just really reaching out.

Thank you.

I really think for you thank you for your time.

Sure.

Thank you.

Thanks.

In the wake of Helen's destruction, people are again struggling with grief and anger and despair.

But we take comfort, in the words of the late Mr. Rogers, who famously said, look for the helpers when something scary was happening.

And that's exactly what we did.

Despite scorching temperatures, senior volunteers worked side by side with the Florida National Guard in Port Charlotte, helping get food and water to their neighbors in Charlotte County.

It's terrible out there, and this has been one of the worst hurricanes that I've ever seen.

86 year old Tony Flores wants those hardest-hit to know people care.

Get back.

Just somebody needs help.

We're here.

Volunteers and staff with Better Together, a local nonprofit, has teams across the state bringing supplies to families most in need.

Their teams met Haiti.

Kobus in Venice, who told us she felt broken.

Her neighborhood has been flooded several times.

I felt traumatized.

Think about it like wherever you love is there and then wait to it.

We need to get you a backpack girl.

So when Amy Trout brought Haiti and her family toys and supplies, it made a big impact.

I feel surprised.

I feel so happy.

I'm like, oh my God, finally.

I've never, ever heard of this, actually.

But my family finally gets to have a little, little piece, get a little bit of help to get our house back together.

At the Animal Welfare League of Charlotte County, staff turned to Facebook to ask folks to foster animals.

Worried floodwaters would again make it tough for them to get back to the building.

Staff member Stephanie Krumm worried about the anxious pets weathering the storm alone.

Like her office buddy lightning, a young man showed up it to me.

It seemed like he was just arrived from heaven.

He was like, oh, he's so cute.

I have to go and get him.

And I looked for maybe a minute, and then I was like, okay, we'll go get this one.

Didn't even look at and the other dogs.

Sawyer and his girlfriend Paige deal in Northport foster lightning through the storm.

It was loving and well-behaved, probably because he had been part of a family for nine years before he was given up by his owners when they moved away.

When it was time for lightning to go back to the Welfare League facility, their foster parents said no way.

We're very lucky and fortunate that we chose him.

Oh, I love him.

And we can see why that family loves him.

Well, we originally said we would bring you a story this week on the amendment to legalize marijuana in light of Hurricane Helene.

We postpone that story until next week.

Join us then as we investigate what approving the amendment would mean for local businesses, state budgets and law enforcement.

That story and more on the next Southwest Florida In Focus.

Have a great week everyone.