By Patricia Mazzei, Emily Cochrane and Abigail Geiger
In his 58 years, John Posey, a lifelong resident of the Forgotten Coast of Florida on the remote eastern edge of the Panhandle, had never evacuated for a hurricane — not for Dennis in 2005, nor for Michael in 2018.
But on Wednesday, as he stood outside his namesake seafood restaurant in Panacea, Florida, a community of about 800 near the marshy shores of Ochlockonee Bay, he admitted that after decades of facing storms head-on, this one felt different. Helene was closing in, and for the first time, he wasn’t sure he could stay.
Across Florida’s Big Bend region, where residents are staring at the third named storm in 13 months, many more people appeared to be heeding evacuation orders, leaving the small towns that dot the coast eerily empty Thursday.
Wakulla County, where Panacea is, was under a mandatory countywide evacuation. So was neighboring Franklin County, where the waterfront city of Carrabelle, with a population of about 2,600, appeared mostly deserted.
In Cedar Key, part of a conglomeration of islands off the northwest coast of Florida, the Florida National Guard arrived in the morning to assess the situation and alert the island’s residents of the coming storm.
“In the last storm here, people would walk by us with beer and we’d say, ‘There’s a hurricane here,’” said Capt. John Meacham. “They’d say, ‘We’ll stick it out.’”
He said that this storm seems different. Though there are still people who have wanted to “stick it out” in Cedar Key, he said, he noticed fewer people overall Thursday.
In Carrabelle, James and Maddie Burmeister finished boarding up the hardware store that he manages early Wednesday afternoon. Maddie Burmeister held a plywood sheet over the front doors as James Burmeister nailed it down using a cordless drill.
On Thursday morning, he made about 35 sales before closing the doors of the shop, which is across the street from a marina. The couple is not sticking around. They live in Crawfordville, about an hour north but still in Wakulla County, which is under a mandatory evacuation. They planned to wait out the storm in Georgia.
“I’m glad we’re not going to be here,” Maddie Burmeister said.
To the east in Steinhatchee, Florida, a small coastal community of a few hundred, Tyler Rayborn, 31, bluntly summarized its state as he worked with a friend to anchor down the sign to his family’s hardware store: “It’s dead. Town’s dead.”
However, not everyone is planning to leave, Rayborn said, including himself. He said he would stay at his home, a short drive inland, before heading back to reopen so people could get supplies.
He said that while some of the people who left are weary of high waters, many of the people who own homes or live in the small coastal community were relatively new to the state, and spooked by the threat of the storm.
“Us, born and raised, we just stay here,” said Rayborn, who had a University of Florida alligator tattoo and an elaborate artistic sketch of the state visible on his left arm. He added, “my family’s been here for generations — there’s nowhere for us to go.”
In Panacea, Posey, the restaurant owner, was assessing his situation. He said he was not convinced that the storm surge would really reach 20 feet, the high end of forecasts for that part of northern Florida.
He has memories of riding out previous storms: “I’d be crabbing in this,” Posey, who is also a commercial fisherman, said of the miserable weather. “During Dennis, I was rescuing people with an aluminum boat.”
But he worried that strong winds could rip off roofs. And he’s older now, he said — a grandfather looking to stay safe.
Posey said he would wait for the water to get to the door of his restaurant.
Then, he might go.
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