Hurricane Helene: “Everywhere I look, devastation”

A wall of seawater from deadly Hurricane Helene forced Briana Gagnier and her family to evacuate their home on Florida's Gulf Coast.

Ms. Gagnier, who lives in Holmes Beach, north of Sarasota, had stayed behind with her family to protect their one-story property.

She placed sandbags at each door and placed her belongings on high furniture to keep them dry. She even used towels to contain the storm surge, to no avail.

Then came a loud bang.

Her garage door burst open violently and collapsed into the flood. The water quickly rose to their shoulders, forcing them to flee.

“Everyone was screaming and panicking,” she told the BBC. “Whatever your worst idea of ​​this storm is, this is what we’re seeing.”

She and her family ran across the street to a neighbor's house, where they eventually rescued two elderly people whose house had gone up in flames.

She said the fire appears to be related to a golf cart battery.

As she looked around, she said she saw couches, chairs, a bench and even a car driving by. The water was over her mailbox for part of the evening, she added.

“I just can't believe this is real. The eye of the storm didn’t even hit us directly,” Ms. Gagnier said. “This island is completely destroyed. Everywhere I look, devastation.”

She is one of many Florida residents along the state's Big Bend Coast suffering the effects of Helene, which forecasters said was unusually large for a Gulf hurricane.

The deadly Category Four storm made landfall in Florida on Thursday evening before weakening to a tropical depression as it moved inland through Georgia and into North Carolina and Tennessee.

As of Friday afternoon, there were 20 known fatalities from the storm, including 11 in Georgia alone. At least five other people were killed in Florida and two more in North Carolina.

As of midday Friday, four million households in the southeastern United States were without power.

Michael Bobbit, who lives on Cedar Key, told the BBC that his house, perched on a hill, “miraculously survived, but the island is completely destroyed.”

In a video he posted on social media, he described the carnage: “Entire houses are missing or collapsed, the hardware store is gone, the downtown jiffy (grocery market) is completely destroyed, the post office is completely destroyed.”

“It's hard to understand. As bad as we imagined it would be, it’s much worse in daylight.”

Mr Bobbit said he believed it would take years for the small island of 720 people to recover.

A man and his dog were rescued by a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter after his 36-foot sailboat entered the water.

The man, who the Coast Guard did not name, was sailing 25 miles off the coast of Sanibel Island when he was struck by the hurricane. He called Channel 16 – the marine emergency channel – to call for help.

Thousands of water rescues were also conducted inland in flooded neighborhoods, including in Atlanta, Georgia, where a home was evacuated amid the flooding.

ML Ferguson, a resident of Anna Maria Island, Florida, told the BBC that roads in the area turned into rivers during a storm surge of up to 10 feet (3 m).

When she returned to her home late Thursday, she found it was also flooded.

“Oh my God, it literally comes down to the second step,” she told the BBC in a telephone interview, before quickly hanging up and rushing to prevent more water from getting in.

In Tallahassee, Florida, some residents like Cainnon Gregg huddled together to weather the storm. Mr. Gregg, who was staying at a friend's shelter, said he wanted to stay near the water to check on his oyster farm as soon as it was safe to do so.

He had spent the last few days protecting it by sinking it into the ocean floor.

His farm was destroyed once before during Hurricane Michael – a Category Five hurricane that struck Florida in 2018 – and he said he is determined to learn from that lesson.

“Hopefully, and nothing is certain, the farm will be nice and safe on the bottom,” he said before the storm. “But anything could happen.”