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Hurricane Helene killed dozens of people, and more bodies are still being found after the storm crashed into Florida and then moved north, flooding Georgia and the Carolinas. Many people barely survived, only to lose their homes, their livelihoods and sometimes their entire net worth. NPR's Frank Morris has this story from the Gulf Coast of Florida.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Soggy, stinking heaps of appliances, broken furniture and keepsakes line the little roads snaking through rural parts of this area north of Tampa. It's all stuff yanked from flooded houses. Eighty-five-year-old James Judy lives on one of those roads in tiny Aripeka, and he was home in his small, old one-story house when Helene's storm surge started tearing the place apart.
JAMES JUDY: When the porch was going up and down, tearing away from the house, I said, you, come on 'cause we got to go right now.
MORRIS: He was talking to his daughter, Carol Judy. Carol says her husband swam for a ladder in the yard, tore a hole in the back porch roof, stuck the ladder through it and helped them up.
CAROL JUDY: Six of us went up and 20 cats. So my 85-year-old dad, my brother and sister-in-law, my autistic nephew and my husband.
J JUDY: It was bad. We wasn't very far from the water, and we was on top of the house.
JOSEPH PARKIN: Thunder, lightning, wind blowing about 70 mile-an-hour gusts.
MORRIS: That's Joseph Parkin, Carol's husband.
PARKIN: When you look around and your roofline is getting smaller and smaller and it looks like a small island, you know you're in trouble. And we were in trouble. I guess about daybreak, we finally caught a break and come back down.
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MORRIS: And when they did, the whole place was wrecked. Helene churned everything in the house. Carol picked her way through the chaotic mess, looking for a shred of solace.
C JUDY: And you know, the morning after the storm, when the water went down, I came back into the house to go in my bedroom and see if there was anything dry, anything at all we could put on. And I couldn't find anything. And I just took my wet clothes off, and I wrapped up in a towel. And I found a dry spot (crying) on the front corner of my mattress because it floated up, and the top corner didn't get wet. And I laid down right there and went to sleep.
MORRIS: Now, days later, she's still struggling to make sense of it all.
C JUDY: You try to imagine what's going on, and how do I really feel about this? And it's - you just - you can't determine how you feel because you're kind of numb, you know?
MORRIS: They've lost nearly all their possessions, their food, their tools, their cars. Just before the storm, they cashed in more than 5,000 pounds of aluminum cans that James spent years collecting on roadsides. But otherwise, they're broke.
PARKIN: I've been devastated before, but never total devastation. And this is total.
MORRIS: They don't have insurance. It's too expensive. Carol has Lupus. James has a bad heart. They're all retired. The only steady income is from James' Social Security check and Carol's disability. But they're alive.
J JUDY: I know we're losing everything, but as long as we can keep ourself safe, the other stuff can be replaced later on. But you can't replace your body. When it's gone, it's gone.
MORRIS: There are other bright spots. A man James Judy took in as a teenager is giving the family an old pickup truck. Relatives paid for a week's stay at a hotel, and Carol Judy has resolved never to ride out another hurricane.
C JUDY: If we ever do get to clean things up and live here again, we will leave before another storm comes.
MORRIS: And it could come before anyone rebuilds. There are two more months before the Atlantic hurricane season officially ends.
Frank Morris, NPR News, Aripeka, Fla. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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