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By Robert Samuels | The Washington Post
MEXICO BEACH, Florida – Ever since residents returned to this seaside town, Dena Frost and her friends have been researching what was left of her former business.
The winds and waves of Hurricane Michael swept through the roof and walls of Frost Pottery Garden, but somehow, many of the goods she sold inside resisted. storm. They found porcelain globes in the water and clay pots in the sand. Under piles of wood, Frost and his friends found tiny ceramic pumpkins still containing small succulents.
"Oh, look, one of my birds," she said recently, as she spotted a flamingo-shaped lawn decoration in a pile of debris.
She had no idea what she would do with what she would have found. In Mexico Beach, there was practically nothing more than vacant lots, sand and sparkling water. It was a small town of 2,000 people loved by its residents and business owners who, like Frost, were determined to rebuild and restore it. They just did not know how.
"Everyone wants to know what you are doing, but you do not know what you are doing," said Frost, 62. "You do not have a house, you do not have a business, you do not have any income."
The change here is now inevitable, in a community that did not want to change. The t-shirts proclaimed this place "Mayberry", the antidote of Florida commercialism to the mascot. Residents now fear that developers will buy desperate homeowners and build towers and golf courses that change the character of the community. Such revivals occurred in Mississippi seaside towns injured after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In many cities, more development would be welcome. But the city council here has actively worked to keep things simple.
They restricted commercial buildings to a maximum height of 48 feet; they did not exceed 32 dwellings. They instituted rules preventing proponents from linking vacant lots and preventing the creation of large, long properties.
Two years ago, developers requested an exception to this rule when they proposed to build a hotel on a series of consecutive lots. Residents launched a social media campaign to close them. The council sits on the side of the residents.
Following Michael, Frost wondered if it would be so easy for the board to be so cavalier. Residents had no idea how much they would get from private insurance or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She rented her building and could not get in touch with the owners. His desire to stay was clear, but the way to get there was uncertain.
While she was looking for old pots tonight, a sunburned man, holding a Michelob Ultra in his hand, approached her. He began a now-familiar conversation about the loss of the city and stared at a now-familiar scene of ruined buildings and mounds of rubble. This time, inside this pile, he saw something unusual.
"Is this my boat?" He said.
"It could be?" She says. "I found part of my old building there. You can find out because the wood is teal.
"Maybe I could save my boat," he said.
He ran across the street and looked in the rubble for a few minutes. His boat was in the pile, but he did not try to dig it up.
"What's the point?" He said. "I can not save him. At least I know it's there, I suppose.
"Many whites"
Nearly a month after Hurricane Michael, Mayor Al Cathey said his city was trying to remain optimistic. The cell towers are in place and the local energy provider has sent 250 trucks and 500 workers to replace each power line that has broken down. It will take another two weeks before the entire city is energized again, Cathey said. The water is not drinkable, but it now flows in faucets and can be used for showering and cooking.
Mr. Cathey testified that no one had yet made an estimate of the damage, and no one had a practical idea of what the redevelopment plans might look like.
"We will have to see how the new building codes affect construction," he said. "There are still a lot of whites to fill."
These sentiments sounded familiar to John Kelly, a city administrator in Gulfport, Mississippi, a town of 70,000 devastated by Katrina. At the time, Kelly said, the city has received more than $ 250 million from FEMA for the reconstruction of sewer lines, the restoration of power grids and the rehabilitation of roads. The infrastructure repair took more than a year, said Kelly, but the improvements then attracted businesses that built new casinos, local restaurants, and then reinvented the city center into a dynamic tourist attraction.
Along the way, said Kelly, the city invited locals to a workshop to give its opinion on the future of the city, which helped boost morale.
"It was more therapeutic than anything else," Kelly said. "But when you are struck by a natural disaster, you need something to keep you going – so that you feel that you can help."
Cathey felt that his city did not need workshops to determine its future. Everyone wanted the place to go back to his past.
"The founding families used to say that we were strong in spirit, back and heart," Cathey said as he stood in front of his hardware store, now mingled with wood and wood. son. "We are not trying to do a show and be something we are not. The families here did not need a Ferris wheel, stickers, or the crush. We are old Florida here. "
He paused.
"But there will be a significant visual change for the place," continued Cathey. "Those old beach cottage houses that have been handed down for generations? They left."
A few minutes later, a gray-haired woman who was passing the hardware store braked hard. She was shaking when she got out of her car. She walked over to Cathey, tears running down her cheeks.
"I had to stop and kiss the mayor," she said. She grabbed him by the arms.
"I'm leaving for a moment, but I'm coming back," she said. "Do you hear me? I do not give up."
Now, it was the mayor whose eyes were torn apart.
"I know there are more like that," he said. "We liked what we had."
Frost felt that way too, but she had to be realistic. She needed to make money.
The business started to take off this year, she said, and then her husband, Jay, developed a cardiac aneurysm. In August, he was gone. Then came Michael and their belongings were gone. Their house was too.
She found an old empty building in Eastpoint City with an apartment above that was for sale. She planned to use the money from her husband's death to buy the building, buy a new cash register and start removing the pots from the sand. She would open a new store in another city.
"I've lost a lot in the past year and it still is," she said. "But I'm at peace with what I have to do."
She was hoping to open a second store in Mexico Beach when the time came. She could not do it, but she still hoped that the city would come back someday. And when that happens, she will come back too.
A calm and serene place
Chris Maday knew it was the beach of Mexico: he had lunch at Sharon's Café and dined at Mango Marley's. He was excited about the new auto store that opened a year ago by a man who also fell in love with the same laid-back, no-nonsense community he loved.
When Maday's children grew up, he loved taking them with snow cones to Tommy T's and accompanying them along the pier. It was a quiet and serene place.
Now trucks and excavators were picking up piles of debris, wood, bricks and rubble. The police sirens blinked and spray paint was painted on the houses of Easter egg color. Signs of free water and hot meals abounded.
Cars drove constantly, windows down, while passengers recorded the video on their phones, their mouths wide open. Because it was a city that did not want any tourist attraction, it had become one.
Sharon's and Mango Marley's were now nested shells. Tommy T collapsed and the wooden planks of the jetty were washed away.
Maday said that he thought the city could restore its original identity if it helped old businesses. So he tried to help Frost find his old business. One day, he was looking in the rubble when a woman shouted, "We found two of his pots there! Do you want them? "
The woman's name was Jane Hughes. The wave that took away the pottery also swept the roof of his family vacation home. The water cascaded inside, pushing back insulation and destroying everything that was there.
"Our house is gone, so we're just trying to help people," she told Maday. She grabbed in her right hand a faded photo 8 x 10, on which she wore a wrist tattoo that said "endure".
Hughes hoped his family could bear. His father had inherited his father's house from the other side of the street 11 months ago. His father bought it from his grand-aunt, who built the house in the 1950s.
"Even after the insurance, the place will probably be higher than we can afford after codifying it," said her husband, Marcus Hughes, reluctantly. Logically, they all agreed that it would make more sense to sell the house than to try to keep it.
"It's not going to happen," said Jane Hughes. "If a developer was trying to buy this house, my dad would probably try to shoot him."
"We just do not know how many people are going to feel this way," said Maday. "Older people can not rebuild; it's too late in their life. Who will be left? Who will be busy? The trucks will be gone and all that will be left will be us. We are just the flavor of the week. Then we will be forgotten forever. "
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