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Patricia Sullivan
Journalist covering government, politics and other regional issues in Arlington County and Alexandria
Luz Lazo
Transportation reporter covering the Washington Metro, buses, Bikeshare Capital, taxis and the region's road network
DRY CREEK, Fla.
On a red dirt road in the center of the Florida Panhandle, in the midst of maturing cotton fields, the pinewood looks like a pickup stick. Some trees are curved like praying mantises and the few lean electric poles are inclined at precarious angles, their threads wrapping around limbs stretched.
Until Saturday, when neighbors broke through with chainsaws and an excavator, Lipford's home, located on 160 acres of family-owned land since the American Civil War, was cut off from civilization. The only way to access the property was an all terrain vehicle crossing waterlogged pastures and bridges built with wooden pallets.
"We are back at the border," said Jean Lipford, 50. Since Hurricane Michael struck that city on Wednesday, she was washing clothes in a bucket and bathing in the creek where her husband built a dam with small stones. His 23-year-old daughter Whitney wielded a chainsaw and came home every two hours to nurse her six-week-old son.
"I want electricity and water. We can do the rest, "said Lipford.
After destroying the Panama City and wiped out Mexico Beach, the eye of the storm swept the north-northeast as a fake, causing misery in one of Florida's poorest regions, as well as in Alabama and Georgia. A high percentage of people live in mobile homes and other vulnerable structures. The destruction extends far into the land. Michael has kept the force of hurricanes throughout the pecan plantations and cotton fields of Georgia.
More than 250,000 customers across Florida were still without electricity on Saturday. Sixteen accommodation centers accommodated 1,800 people.
Search and rescue operations are continuing not only in Mexico Beach, bulldozed by a storm surge 14 feet, but also in the backcountry, where residents manage on their own and sometimes fear they have been forgotten by the outside world.
Deborah Bayer came out of Hurricane Michael, clutching her Bible in the bathroom of her mobile home in Lynn Haven, a small town just north of Panama Beach. The sky was clouded, the electricity was cut off, the wind screamed and she felt the whole structure moving on its foundations. A tree crushed on the roof.
"It was a fun ride. I sat reading my Bible with burning candles. I just waited for it to pass, "recalls Bayer, 47, who lives in a trailer park.
Elected officials had ordered her and other residents to evacuate before the hurricane. But how? Up & # 39; where? She works at minimum wage in a call center. She could not afford a hotel room. And the storm came so fast that there was not enough time to prepare for a multi-day stay in a remote shelter.
Blocks are jammed Friday in Mexico Beach, Florida, where buildings were erected after Hurricane Michael touched down in the Florida Panhandle as a Category 4 storm and left the area largely destroyed. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post)
In Bristol, a small town in Florida's smallest county, Liberty, where the largest two-lane highway and half of the land is in a national forest, Emergency Management Director Rhonda Lewis has found cut off from the rest of the world. No power, no landlines or cell phone connections, no internet. A satellite phone would not work. He did not stop saying "seek. . . research. . . seeking, said Lewis.
It was only Thursday night that she managed to find a man with an amateur radio in nearby Calhoun County and bring him back to Bristol, where she could send calls for help.
"Reconstruction will be a problem. Because they are so poor. Many homes had no insurance, "Lewis said.
Lines were formed at the Ace hardware store, where people went to pick up emergency supplies. The Red Cross has arrived.
On Friday, Tiffany Garling, executive director of the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce – where Dry Creek is located – spent a full night for the first time since Sunday when she went to work at the Emergency Operations Center. County. She does not know how many people are still cut in this largely rural county, where peanuts and cotton are the main agricultural products.
"I have no idea, that's what's scary, there's no way to estimate," she said.
Road clearing is laborious, with highways needing attention before national highways, county roads or single streets – many of which are blocked by giant oaks requiring heavy equipment, not just a chainsaw.
Garling think the county is 100% free of electricity in residential areas.
"Our problems are different from those in the city," she said. Without electricity, people can not draw water from their wells.
Hayes Baggett, the police chief of the nearby town of Marianna, said that inland communities never receive as much attention as cities with white-sand beaches. But people are shooting together, he said. There had been some curfew violations and some robbery, but no widespread looting.
According to the governor's office, families in Liberty and Jackson counties have been approved for individual assistance by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and food and water have been dropped in the worst affected areas.
Similar stories took place in neighboring Georgia, where Becky Abshire, a long-time resident of Albany, was worried about how she would raise her 10-year-old grandson, Ashton, with $ 750 from her family. disability benefits.
Abshire, 60, evacuated her three-piece caravan but came back to find that a tree had hit the room she shared with Ashton.
"What I can not afford, I hope my son will," she said. But the son has his own family to support.
Rescue operations are in progress inland, on dirt roads blocked by felled trees. Teams that can not drive to rural areas need to walk, said Sean Collins, 47, a retired firefighter in Marianna.
"We do not know if some of the older people who live in these woods are doing well and have been contacted," he said.
Because Marianna is so far from the coast – closer to Alabama than to Panama City – the residents have not evacuated, he said.
"Nobody thought it was going to be so devastating," Collins said.
Even in some parts of Panama City, the audience seemed very far away. A community with garden-style apartments, the Garden Dickinson Memorial Homes, known as the projects of 11th Street, was unrecognizable after the storm. The parking lot was flooded. Several apartments were without roof; the furniture was destroyed. Families slept in their cars and benches.
On the way, a leak of gas worries the inhabitants for a possible explosion.
"It's not a question of laughter. Nobody came to help us. No, nothing at all, "said Samantha Gardner, 33. Her 6-year-old boy had two asthma attacks Wednesday night, she said, and calls to the police for help went unanswered.
"He needs a machine. We have no power. We do not have water. We have nothing, "she said.
On the other side of town, Patty Butler, 52, cried while walking his dog in his neighborhood. Their shopping center, home to a food store, a printing shop and a tamale shop, was destroyed. The roof is gone. Windows closed, broken windows.
"It's horrible," she says. "They have the best tamales you will ever eat," she says as she looks at the destroyed building. Butler's house was almost entirely spared, trees all around her were found and her boat rocked.
"We have a small hole in the roof and all our fences are gone, but we can live with that. Other people have lost everything, everything. I am so blessed. God is good, he has been with us all the time. "
For this close-knit community, where neighbors went to check on neighbors after the storm, subscribers who passed the service passed their phone to others.
"It will bring us closer. Much closer, she says. "I really feel in my heart that we're going to bounce back stronger than ever."
We still do not know how and where people will bounce back.
Betty Davis, 80, who lives in the historic Afro-American community of Apalachicola, known as Hill, which dates back to the 1830s, spent Friday afternoon thinking about what's going on. had passed and what could follow.
"I was lying on the floor and I heard this thing coming in. It looked like two trains, on separate tracks," Davis said.
In Apalachicola, many locals are relying on strong family ties to overcome difficult times, but the oyster fishery, once plentiful, has collapsed in recent years, which has accentuated the pressures. Davis said that she did not know how the poorest would fend off after the storm.
But she knows one thing.
"If they see another coming," Davis said, "I'll leave, if I have to walk in. I'll never do it again."
Lazo has been reported to Lynn Haven, Florida, and Albany, Georgia, Achenbach and Sellers, Washington. Kevin Begos in Apalachicola, Florida, contributed to this report.
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