WFSU | By Margie Menzel
PublishedAugust 30, 2024 at 12:43 PM EDT
It’s been a year since Hurricane Idalia struck North Central Florida. It became the first storm to hit an area that hadn’t seen a hurricane in more than 40 years. It was already a challenge for Madison County to recover -- and then came Hurricane Debby.
“Looking back at Idalia, the success of our recovery has been neighbors helping neighbors. That’s what has helped our community recover the most.”
That’s Madison County Emergency Management Director Leigh Basford. She says they’ve had volunteer groups in the community for over a year now, helping county residents recover. For a while, they had search and rescue, debris operations, feeding operations…
“...mental health came in to help our children in our school systems,” said Basford. “So, we have continued over the year to really try to pour resources into our community.”
But they had a lot to recover from. Jane McClung still shudders when she talks about Idalia.
“ It was horrendous. The damage that was done here in Madison County was unbelievable,” McClung said. “I had a friend that lost her whole house, and her standing inside of it the only thing that didn’t get totally destroyed was the room she was standing in when it went down.”
Madison Strong formed in the wake of Idalia. It’s led by Devin Thompson and Katie Knight. Thompson, the chair, says the organization has received grants in partnership with the Community Foundation of North Florida. They’ve spent roughly $250,000 in donations helping their neighbors recover, keeping in daily touch with their benefactors.
“We have put on new roofs on homes,” Thompson said. “That was our big issue last year, we had a lot of trees on homes. And so we were able to use some of those grant funds to repair the damages to the homes. We’ve worked a lot with the vulnerable populations here in the county…the elderly, the fiscally constrained.”
State Representative Allison Tant, whose district includes Madison County, said the median income is a little over $20,000 a year, and there were residents living with tarps over their homes even before Hurricane Debby hit. And she said prior to Idalia, there had been no written or oral history in Madison County of any wind event.
“And so those trees are centuries and centuries old,” said Tant. “And because they’re that old and they haven’t been tested, they’re giant. And so when they come down, the damage is astonishing, and a volunteer group with a handsaw is just not going to be able to cut the tree into pieces and move it off – particularly private property, much less off of thoroughfares or even private property that is used for public conveyance, like EMS, fire, ambulance, all of that.”
And that was before Hurricane Debby, which arrived on August 5th. Thompson says Madison Strong is now serving families who were hit by both hurricanes. One family had just moved back into their home when Debby hit and flooded it again.
Now, on the anniversary of Idalia, the recent floodwaters are still receding. Emergency Management Director Basford says it wasn’t Debby that caused the flooding so much as a series of rainstorms, including one that dumped 12 inches of rain on Madison County in 12 hours.
But due to the flooding, Thompson says, until recently, Madison Strong couldn’t get to some of the hardest-hit families.
“We’ve been really busy this week especially because a lot of the flooding has started to recede in the homes, and we’ve kind of been just sitting on pins and needles waiting for the flooding to go down so we could get into some of the homes,” said Thompson. “They’ve actually been having to take boats to get into, like, back to the homes but the water has receded down to where they could get in and start working…”
Jennifer Poore, executive director of the Madison County Chamber of Commerce & Tourism, says the community as a whole has been “incredibly resilient. Downtown, you’ll see ripped awnings and downed signage -- but the businesses are open.”
And Madison Strong treasurer Katie Knight says she hopes people won’t forget about the county that’s still struggling.
“People tend to forget about a week after,” she said. “Once it’s not on the news anymore, we don’t exist, so the more awareness we can bring -- the community is still in need, you know, and that we are still recovering, the more help we’ll be able to bring to the community.”
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