STEINHATCHEE, Fla. — Cheri and Rusty Jakes were forced to wait for about a foot of storm surge to recede from their property on Monday before they could start cleaning the mess that Debby made.
The Jakeses live in Steinhatchee (pronounced steen-HATCH-ee), a tiny fishing town on Florida’s Big Bend, where Debby made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane early on Monday. Their property is right on the Steinhatchee River, which flowed into the couple’s carport, flooding it.
“We don’t have any monetary damages, just emotional damage,” said Cheri Jakes, 67, as she gestured toward several decades-old photo albums with wedding pictures and pictures of her family. “All of my children’s baby books got flooded,” she added, holding back tears. “That’s the most devastating thing. I don’t care about anything else right now.”
Rusty Jakes, 66, pulled a wooden filing cabinet with “important papers” out of a storage closet in the carport beneath their home. It was clearly water damaged.
“These file cabinets I had on top of the cooler there,” said Rusty Jakes, who spent Sunday night stacking boxes into the storage unit, in an effort to protect them from flooding. “Evidently, it floated just enough for it to fall.”
Their home is elevated on stilts, protecting the interior living space from flooding. Early on Monday morning, they thought everything in their carport below was safe.
“This morning, it was totally dry,” Jakes said. Then the couple went down to the carport to make coffee on a grill at around 8 a.m. That’s when they saw the floodwaters from the river starting to rise. “It started coming up, coming up, coming up,” he said.
Steinhatchee was battered last year by Hurricane Idalia, a stronger Category 3 storm that covered the town in goopy, brown river mud. Hours after Debby came ashore Monday, several gravel roads in town remained partially flooded. Docks were partially submerged along the river, though most homes, elevated on stilts, appeared dry.
Usually, the town would be bustling this time of year for scallop season. Saturday was a “madhouse,” said Skipper McCall, 69, a lifelong Steinhatchee resident who stayed home during the storm.
After surveying his home after the storm, McCall said that the only damage he found was a thin strip of siding that had been peeled back from the outer wall of his home. “They hollered wolf too early,” he said. “We get more wind out of a thundershower.”
The only store that looked open Monday was an Ace Hardware, which had a steady stream of people buying mops, buckets, tarps and extension cords, Tyler Rayborn, the store’s assistant manager, said. The winds were strong when he opened the shop at 7:30 a.m., he said, though the rain did not pick up until later in the morning. Idalia had been much worse, he added.
For Debby, many residents had evacuated. The Jakeses thought they had been perhaps the only ones among their neighbors who had stayed for the storm.
“It could’ve been a lot worse,” Cheri Jakes said. “We could’ve lost a roof, or a tornado could’ve come through, but it didn’t. You’ve got to count your blessings.”
This article originally appeared in . c.2024 The New York Times Company
