TAMPA, Fla. — Many residents in the Palmetto Beach neighborhood of Tampa are still trying to recover after Hurricane Helene and many residents here fear the crumbling seawall, that’s supposed to protect the neighborhood, won’t last.
If you take a walk through Palmetto Beach, you’ll see the sheer devastation. There’s garbage in people’s front yards, and many people here have lost everything. This is as residents here try to rebuild just a week after the hurricane. The winds were so intense during Hurricane Helene that they pushed water from McKay Bay onto land. “So, coming into a home that was heavily hit with about four to five feet of water inside.”
Tom Reynolds has lived in Palmetto Beach his entire life, and he invited me into his home to see the damage. He said his house had about three to four feet of water.
“Obviously, no power, no A.C., no anything,” said Reynolds as we walked through his hallway.
“Just mounds and mounds of garbage now that’s not even family memories anymore. The force was so strong, it flipped the refrigerator on its side and it turned it 90 degrees.”
He said mold has been growing faster than he can remove it. “One room in particular that was knee-deep with everything is this room. You can see a stack of debris that was my life, that was the life that I knew and had memories of and I’m not the worst out of everybody,” said Reynolds.
Reynolds told me he’s concerned about his neighbors not having enough resources to get by. “A lot of blue-collar families. A lot check-to-check and hand-to-mouth and just trying to survive every day to provide a good life for their family,” he said.
Palmetto Beach was destroyed by a hurricane back in 1921. When they rebuilt the neighborhood, they decided to construct a seawall that would protect this community from the waters of McKay Bay. However, now, residents are concerned about the efficacy of the crumbling seawall that’s more than 100 years old. “As you can see here, these are all brand new failures that have happened on just the cap of where you could walk. The seawall has been patched with band-aids instead of stitches for decades,” said Reynolds as we stood on the badly damaged seawall. He fears that without a major rehab project to the seawall, this community could be wiped off the map in a future storm.
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