PALM HARBOR, Fla. — Along each road in Palm Harbor’s Baywood Village, debris and damaged belongings from Hurricane Helene’s storms surge stack high outside homes.
Roughly 500 of the 600 residences were flooded one week ago, since then a massive cleanup has been underway—and it’s the strength in the community that’s making the overwhelming effort a little easier.
“If there was anything that was left it was just up on the walls,” Sam Norman said. “Just every single thing was wet, anything that could hold water, clothing, the beds. You opened up the oven and the water poured out.”
Sam and Brittany Norman’s home is now empty; drywall and cabinets were torn down after roughly 30 inches of water flooded inside. It’s a first for them. They’ve had street flooding before, but it’s never gotten this high or done this much damage.
“It started coming up about 7:30p [last week] and then just kept coming and kept coming,” added Sam, saying they evacuated to higher land with their three daughters.
If you ask anyone who lives in the Palm Harbor waterfront community, it’s more water than they’ve ever seen before.
“There's people that have lived in this neighborhood for 40 years, and their house has never flooded, and now they have multiple feet of water in their house. It is a once-in-a-lifetime type event,” says neighbor Adam Reister.
An event Reister says has been incredibly difficult for the families who call the quaint area home.
“There's a lot of families that are being displaced by this. And so we've seen a lot of need for the community to come together from what I've experienced the last week,” Reister added. “It's been a really long seven days."
But despite all the damage over the last week, folks like Adam and many others have been working non-stop to lend a helping hand.
Whether that’s draining pools, helping demo, doing laundry or dropping off drinks and food to help those in the recovery process. Reister says they’ve been using a neighborhood Facebook page to identify needs and coordinate help.
“That's what's most amazing to me, is to see everybody's level of humanity and wanting to help their neighbor,” Reister explained.
That’s why, even in the face of tragedy and the long recovery road ahead, there’s no doubt about why these Baywood Village residents still love where they live.
“Someone asked if we were going to rebuild and sell and you're going to go through disasters and storms of life, whether they're physical like this, or emotional or whatever,” Brittany Norman said. “I just would rather be here with people who are just ready to come in [and help]--and we are that for other people, but right now we get to experience that.”
“We joke in our little local Facebook group. We're family now, so, you know, we're not going anywhere,” she added.