Gimmee Shelter

Before the devastating hurricanes of 2005, as I drove across the Gulf Coast in 2004, I didn’t know that in about a year the whole multi-state area would be in so much trouble and so poorly provided for in its time of need. That the kindness of strangers would be equally, if not over-balanced, by the complete opposite, as so many people were abandoned in the devastation. I have no expertise on the events that have left people unable to this day to return to their homes. Talk about threats to the environment -- those acts of nature were all about global warming, the biggest threat of all to life on earth as we know it. As I continue in my tale, keep in mind that this chapter is a different story than the one I wrote as I traveled through the south in 2004.

Let me try to describe the beautiful paradise of St. George Island, Florida. At least it looked like paradise when I was there. It lies just off the main coast, accessible by a causeway from Eastpoint, Florida. The pleasant white sand island is just 28 miles long and no more than two miles at its widest. About two thirds of the island is heavily built up with summer homes, hotels and tourist businesses. (That would be the non-paradise section.) The eastern third of the island, 1962 acres, is devoted to the state park. Mainly a nature preserve with hiking trails, the park also provides camping and picnic facilities, boat docks, and nine miles of white sand beach. Boardwalks take people over the dunes, protecting the delicate grasses that hold the dunes together until a hurricane destroys them. On this long narrow island, the ocean side provides the white sands, while the bay side shelters needle rush and spartina marshes. There are even some freshwater ponds and sloughs on the island.

The island has existed above sea level for at least 5000 years. I would have thought hurricanes would make its existence more fragile. Investigators have found evidence of pre-Columbian native peoples in the artifacts of their trash mounds, including pottery shards, stone gaming pieces, and a grinding stone. With the arrival of modern humans, our impacts became more severe. In the early 1900s, people scarred the slash pines for turpentine. During World War II, troops used the dunes for training exercises. While the rest of the island has been destroyed or enhanced (depending on your inclination) by buildings and roads, the park acreage was set aside in the 1960s.

As usual, dogs are not allowed on the beaches. In such cases, I drove from the campground to the beach parking lot and left The Poor Dude in the Escaper with the fan going (escape for me, a cell for him?) while I guiltily enjoyed the sand and ocean (actually I got over the guilt pretty quickly). Besides gazing with desire at the blue waters lapping the white sands, I walked along taking photographs, picking up shells and sand dollars, and observing the occasional native creature. These were usually sea birds – plovers, terns, and oystercatchers – but on my evening there I also saw a little crab doing his (her?) odd sideways scramble to be rid of me. He posed nicely for me before I watched him head into the dunes. I have a nice shot of him looking at the camera like a little prizefighter with a squinting eye and front claws raised like little crustacean fists. This attitude predisposes me to use the male pronoun in reference to my crabby friend. He was about six inches wide from right to left claw, and mainly white in color with yellow hairs along his yellow tinged claws and a dusting of sand clinging here and there about him. One of his brown eye stems was partially covered in sand, giving him the squinting aspect of the boxer. Looking up from the tiny creature, I saw a great blue heron silhouetted against the setting sun as it sat on a grassy dune. Paradise enough for me.

The Dude was allowed to walk along the park roads, so we inspected the campground loops and the stretch of road along the length of the barrier island. At the edge of the campground was a pond surrounded by marsh. Looking across it hoping to spot a heron or egret, I saw what at first appeared to be one large undulating low built animal. Raising my binoculars, I saw that it was in fact an adult otter and four young ones moving swiftly along the edge of the pond. They were gone before I could get the camera out, but too far away across the pond for a clear picture anyway.

Hurricane Dennis, a category 3 hurricane, struck St. George Island and the surrounding area on July 10, 2005. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita soon followed Dennis, destroying more of the Gulf Coast and undoing any repairs that had begun post Dennis. I searched the Internet for hurricane information on areas I had visited. Internet search engines are wonderful, are they not? Back when I was in college, going way back to the 1970s here, I never would have had the stamina to research even a quarter of what I can find with a few typed key words and the click of a GO button. I found interesting stories on web sites from sources such as official state hurricane summaries, realtors, civic club news and the Environmental Impact Statement the park service did before replacing the destroyed park facilities on St. George Island.

I found lots of pictures of the park and the town on the island after the storm. The town looked like it had fared quite well considering the hurricane winds reached 115 to 120 miles per hour. Houses of both wealthy and middle class seemed to be standing yet on their stilts. One site reported that though windows were broken and walls damaged, through it all a half-full cup of orange soda survived sitting on a deck railing. A gas station where I had phoned home was pictured with its pump roof in tangled shreds. Highway 98, not far from where I had broken down, was washed out in many places by the huge waves beating upon them. Photos showed great slabs of asphalt strewn about the beachside two-lane road. On the island itself, it seems like the park was hit worst. There the storm took out the entrance road, the boardwalks, restrooms, campground facilities and the sand dunes. Many of the St. George park facilities were damaged in Hurricane Dennis but have been restored.

The island, like other areas hit, lost water, electric and phone utilities. I learned that the island has no wells, so all the potable water is brought by a pipeline along the bridge access. I didn’t see any mention of a wash-out of the four-mile-long bridge that joins the island to the mainland. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued reports on damages all along the Panhandle. On St. George Island, Dennis caused major beach and dune erosion, but only five single-family homes sustained major damage from wind, flooding and erosion of sand beneath the structures. Apparently many homes and businesses on the mainland coast were not so lucky. In Franklin County, an area of 20 cottages and some favorite old restaurants was destroyed completely. Residents told a reporter of the Tallahassee Democrat News that they were worried that the land would be sold for condos, ruining their county’s “bucolic charm.” I would not have thought of that serious threat.

A realtor’s web site complains that property sales were way down on St. George. For 2006, it showed sales of only 53 properties compared to 378 in 2004. It seems that many property owners on the island have decided it is not a place they want to be. They may be finding the increased property taxes and insurance rate more than they can stomach. On July 1, 2006, there were 549 property listings on the island. Sounds like a lot of disappointed beach owners want to leave.

How did the wildlife fare? The endangered Florida brown pelican was hard hit in the area, one of only four nesting sites in the state. In June 2005, officials had counted 551 nests, 807 eggs, and 478 chicks on Pelican Reef. The day after Dennis, volunteers rescued about 100 young pelicans from the water. Biologists say that the Florida brown pelican will recover but it will take time. Loggerhead, green and leatherback turtles also nest on the beaches. The dunes keep them from wandering onto roads and other populated areas. Even in normal times, biologists patrol the beaches during nesting season, fencing off the nests from predators and humans.

In 2006, residents of St. George Island volunteered their labor to begin restructuring the dunes. With grants from several sources, they have installed snow fencing at an angle that will catch wind blown sand, speeding up the rebuilding of the dunes. They are also planting native vegetation in the new dunes and constructing walkovers for people to use when going down to the beach, thus keeping all our human feet from damaging the fragile plants and shifting sands.

Recreating of dunes and beaches is under way all along the Gulf Coast. Restoration of the sands should protect the buildings along the coast from normal wave action and storms, reducing erosion that can destroy wildlife habitat as well as damage human structures and recreation facilities. The Western Walton County/Destin Beach Restoration Project is spending $23 million to rebuild seven miles of beach. They are funding the restoration with a bed tax (tourist tax on hotel rooms) and grants from the state. They are dredging sand from an underwater spot and pumping it to the beach through a submerged pipeline. The end result will be a wider beach and new dunes.

A little over a month after Dennis wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast, Katrina came and pounded some areas even harder. Katrina did not hit the Panhandle coast of Florida as hard as did Dennis, whose storm center hit the Gulf Islands National Seashore near the border of Alabama and Florida. The eye of Katrina landed in Louisiana, causing the worst damage in New Orleans and surrounding areas. In September, Hurricane Rita came through the Gulf Coast area causing more beach-front erosion and some damage to beach-front dwellings, but the damage was not as serious in the Panhandle as it was farther west. The eye of Rita landed near the Texas, Louisiana border.

Back in 2004, when I headed back to the mainland from St. George Island, I was wishing I could stay longer, but increasingly aware that I had a deadline to meet up with Tom. Usually I like to drive about 100 to 300 miles in a day. Anymore and it starts to be work, staying on the road, pedal to the metal and still only achieving a comfortable 60 to 65 miles per hour. So I tried to eyeball the distance ahead of me, divide it by 200 (miles per day), and figured it would take 7 or 8 days to get to Villanueva. I concluded I better keep going and not dally anywhere. Except look: There’s a national park in between here and the border of New Mexico. I hadn’t planned on visiting Big Bend National Park. I had thought it too far off my track to include. But now that I was this far south, and thinking that I may never get to this part of the country again, it began to seem imperative to visit and check it off my list. If I kept going straight west of the Panhandle on I10, I would be passing within 100 miles of Big Bend. After a short stop in the national park to get the drift of Big Bend, I could head north and visit Guadalupe Mountains National Park as well. I wouldn’t be stopping as I passed by Carlsbad Caverns National Park unless I managed to have time to spare. I had visited those fabulous caverns the year before, so I was willing to make the sacrifice.

I had trouble pulling myself away from the beach next morning, so didn’t get the planned 200 miles covered the next day. State Route 98 was busy, passing through the intensely populated area around Panama City. Late in the afternoon, I made a brief stop at Eden Gardens State Park. The brochure touts the park as a “place of tranquility and contemplation.” Lois Maxson had turned the house and grounds into a showplace estate, after the property had served as a sawmill village at the turn of the twentieth century. Only the 5,600 square foot mansion of the Wesley Lumber family remains as a monument to the wealthy family who sold all the old growth timber in the area. When the mill burned down, the family did not rebuild. The brochure does not say what happened to the 20-some company houses where the workers lived, just that all that remains are a few foundations. When Maxson bought the property in 1953, she refurbished it and added on to suit her style, but by 1968 she must have been either broke or just tired of gardening and decorating, because she donated it to the state.

Now people can tour the house (tours not available the day I was there) and walk in the gardens. The imposing white house surrounds itself with two-story antebellum pillared porches. In the side yard is a lovely reflecting pool, the bottom of which must be painted an emerald green, as the placid water seemed to glow like a watery green carpet with groups of water lily pads here and there. Large concrete bowls barely overflowed to create a subtle fountain here and there. I was disappointed with the gardens. Little was in bloom except some blue hydrangeas. I had missed the season for the early spring blooming azaleas, and the roses were not yet in bloom in the extensive rose garden. I didn’t linger long in Eden.

A jump of about 150 miles brought me to Henderson Beach State Park, more of the same fabulous beach that I had loved at St George, with a major difference. Whereas St. George was mostly surrounded by undeveloped state forest area, Henderson was penned in on three sides by the suburbs and tall condominiums of the city of Destin. I pulled up to the park gate assuming I’d find the same sparsely populated campgrounds I had found in most of the state. Not the case here, but the kind woman in the booth told me I was in luck. She had just had a cancellation, so I could have site 30. It was the last one available.

Settling in, I was surprised to find that my site afforded me quite a bit of privacy. All kinds of lovely tropical Florida vegetation shielded sites from each other quite well. The parking spot looped into my site leaving a little island of shrubs and small trees between the road and me. Sitting in my chair in the shade, I was treated to the sight and song of blue jays, cardinals, mourning doves, brown-headed cowbirds, and a few others I didn’t recognize. While inside making dinner, I was serenaded by a mockingbird belting out quite a variety of tunes right outside the camper door.

I had seen lots of wildlife in Florida. Well, one can call it “wild” life I suppose, but I would call many critters of Florida (and many other places in the US) “creatures that have adapted to living with humans all over the place.” Not really wild, not really tame. Okay. Alligators are still wild, but they have adapted to living with humans around. In the last three weeks I had seen alligators, otters, tortoises, one crab, some snakes and lizards, eagles, osprey, egrets, herons and vultures, on the wilder side of creatures. As wild creatures, they either stay away from people or eat them. The almost tame varieties included raccoons, armadillos, gophers, chipmunks, squirrels, deer and sparrows. These species have learned to live among us, eat our garbage or handouts, and though sensibly skittish, are often as tame as pets.

Birds, the smaller ones at least, really belong in their own category. They can fly away from us most of the time, so retain the wildness, but they deign to live near humans thus giving them the “almost tame” qualification. I enjoyed viewing Pileated Woodpeckers, beautiful blue Scrub Jays, Ruddy Turnstones (little fat killdeer-like birds that turn pebbles to find insects), and the multitudinous small shorebirds. I wish I had seen a Purple Gallinule, not only because they are beautiful purple, green and blue, but because they have a nice name. I saw many plovers, but whether they were Snowy, Piping, Wilson’s, Semipalmated or Common Ringed, I can’t tell even from my photographs. The park website tells me Piping Plovers and Snowy Plovers inhabit the area at times. I also saw the larger plovers we call Killdeer. I may have seen a Marbled Godwit, which is common in the Gulf Coast according to the older version I have of the National Geographic Society Birds of America. But again, I just like that name, so it may have been one of the many other kinds of sandpipers residing in the Gulf. Can you tell I am not much of a birder?

The park is named for the family who owned it prior to its purchase by the state for $13.1 million dollars under the Save Our Coast Program. It was opened to the public in 1991. Comprised of just 208 acres, the park is a refuge from surrounding condominiums for Sand Pines, Scrub Oaks, Southern Magnolias, Dune Rosemary and a variety of wildflowers. Wildlife includes sea turtles, Black Skimmers, Sanderlings, Brown Pelicans and Laughing Gulls. When I was there, the park was a beautiful oasis in a burgeoning city. Though I could hear traffic noise from my campsite, the sheltering vegetation and the stretch of white sand beach gave me the illusion of paradise. The yearly chance of hurricanes and the three that showed up in 2005, make a mockery of any such illusions.

Henderson Beach State Park was just 32 miles east of the eye of Dennis, thus more heavily hit than the St George Island area. According to one web article, Dennis alone washed away more than $12 million worth of sand from Destin area beaches. The beach suffered major erosion, resulting in extensive flood damage to roads and utilities. In the city of Destin, the state reported 35 structures with major damage or completely destroyed. To find out what damage the 2005 hurricanes did there, I called the park. I was told the boardwalks were destroyed and are now rebuilt. The buildings came though with little damage. As a result, the park was able to reopen three days after Dennis. At Navarre Beach State Park, about 20 miles west of Destin, all the facilities were destroyed, including an 800 foot fishing pier, and the beach had major erosion. That park’s facilities have not been restored, and according to a park ranger at Henderson Beach I spoke to over the phone, the park service will not be rebuilding them.

Pictures spoke loudly about the effects of the hurricanes. Florida EPA reports showed before and after photos of a house near Navarre Beach. In the photo taken immediately after Dennis, the roofing had been mostly removed, and the house stood on its piers right on the beach. The piers were no longer buried as deeply in the sand, creating a hazard of further damage to the house if the piers shifted. Roof repairs that had been done before Katrina survived the other two hurricanes, but the beach was further eroded and now the house stood in the waters of the gulf. According to the report, flooding was worse in such areas during Katrina and Rita because Dennis had already removed much of the protective sands and dunes.

Other post-Katrina photos showed more effects of waves and winds. Near Destin, a motel was undercut by beach erosion so that the beach side of the building hung in the air. Another showed a swimming pool filled by wind and wave driven sand, while yet another showed the remaining two walls of a pool, the rest of which had collapsed onto the beach when the sand was eroded from beneath it. Some photos showed Gulf Coast homes and other buildings that had collapsed completely after one or another of the three storms. The waves took out not only sandy soils but also concrete retaining walls.

Here is an interesting quote from a blog by someone called Hurricane John: “Jay station roof did not blow off. It lifted up and came back down in place with some building and water damage.” This blog seems to have been giving an hour by hour account of developments as they were happening, reporting on where to find a shelter and how many people were in shelters, what damages there were to various areas on the Gulf coast, and info on how many people were without power (at one point, 200,000 customers of just one company, Gulf Power). Some of the info bits: traffic signals out almost everywhere; all intersections to be treated as four way stops; homes at Pensacola washed into streets; and sewage overflows due to people flushing toilets while the sewage system was inoperable.

Dennis had already done so much damage, and the force of Katrina was less in the Panhandle than further west, so the situation there after Katrina was not as severe. Two structures in Destin were reported damaged in the state’s summary of Katrina. After Dennis had eroded the beaches, the water was already closer to the structures on the beaches. Those structures got more sand in their pools and in their first floors from Katrina. Following Dennis, projects had been begun to replace sand on some beaches. Katrina destroyed that progress and eroded the shores further. As the sand was drawn inland by the storms, it was left there blocking roads and even blocking some coastal lakes that had drained into the gulf. Rita compounded the problems in September, though Rita affected the Panhandle less than the previous two hurricanes because the eye of that storm was further west.

A few details of the force of the various hurricanes illuminate the ferocity of the storms. Dennis produced waves as high as 35 feet in the gulf south of Pensacola during its category four stage. As it landed near Navarre Beach, it slowed to a category three, moving inland as far as Tennessee before slowing to the lowest storm category of “tropical depression.” Around Pensacola, 650,000 cubic yards of sand were lost from beaches during Katrina, in addition to the losses from Dennis. Katrina was the fourth most powerful hurricane on record in the Atlantic basin. Katrina grew from a category three hurricane with winds of up to 115 MPH while crossing Miami and the Everglades on August 27, to a category five with winds of up to 175 MPH when it made landfall east of New Orleans on August 29. After landfall, it slowed to category three again with winds up to 125 MPH. Katrina spawned 33 tornadoes in a path that was a couple of hundred miles wide. As we all know, the worst hit area was New Orleans, because of the large city population in the area. Eighty percent of the city of New Orleans was flooded.

I know there are many complicated emotions and property laws involved that make the situation too difficult for me to understand. However, allow me to echo many other people who ask -- why the hell are people allowed to build on the beaches and the wetlands in the first place? And why are they allowed to rebuild? I suppose there are many just reasons but how can they be sensible reasons? And of course the bigger moral issue -- what is wrong with able people not helping the residents of the city?

If, like me, you were not there during the hurricanes, your mind is probably as boggled as mine, trying to imagine surviving the ravages of such weather and such tragedy. If you were there, my heart goes out to you. I offer you my earnest best wishes for recovery.