Well, to say the last few days have been surreal would be an understatement of epic proportions. Here’s the story (long as it is) of what happened at our place in the flood of a lifetime for so many people near and well beyond – both the unfathomable event and the incredible aftermath. It wasn’t the car next door bursting spontaneously into an inferno the next night, but the equally unexpected flood of family and friends reaching out to help in person or check on us from afar.
Rewind the tape to 9:30 p.m. Thursday when the first sign of surge water appeared eerily on our front patio – about 20 yards further than we’d ever seen it before in 36 years of living in our house in the Snell Isle area of Northeast St. Petersburg. With my wife Janie out of town, I summoned our two younger kids who live with us – Emma and Davey – to take a look. We were instantly alarmed. Storm water often turned our quiet little street into a mini-river, but nothing ever crept anywhere close to the house. Suddenly my plan of placing two bags of mulch on a tarp at the foot of our front door as a just-in-case barricade if the unimaginable happened would be put to the test. Up to 9 p.m., when there was virtually no water on the street, it seemed like it wouldn’t – and I’d been texting out-of-town friends and family that we seemed to have dodged a bullet.
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Courtesy Dave Scheiber Dave ScheiberBut now, at just before 10 p.m., I hastily took another precaution – grabbing a roll of duct tape and double-taping the bottom of our front door and sides about two feet up from the inside. Pro tip 1: duct tape may serve many good purposes, but holding back an historic hurricane surge is not one of them. I had thought maybe it might work like that TV pitchman Phil Swift who makes boats out of it in infomercials. Sadly, no.
Within minutes around 10 p.m., water began seeping under the door in spite of my best taping efforts. That’s how it began – not with a rush of incoming water like I’d always pictured if the unthinkable happened, but just like a spreading spill on the floor, like a creepy creature in an alien movie. Calling Janie to alert her, she urged me to check the garage – I’m thinking it should be fine because, well, the garage door always makes solid contact with the cement driveway.
Pro Tip 2: This is not the same as a vacuum seal. As I opened the door from the kitchen hallway to the garage, I saw the silent intruder was already slowly pooling its way underneath. I hastily grabbed every towel in reach and laid them across the length of the garage door, thinking this might stop the perhaps temporary flow.
Pro Tip 3: Towels do not serve as an effective deterrent in a flood. At that moment, I heard Davey calling out from across the house – the water had crested from our pool in the darkness, covering the entire back porch in a matter of minutes. It was now seeping steadily under the sliding glass doors into the family room. That was the reality check moment that we were fu…in really big trouble.
In seconds, we started grabbing everything of value on the floor. For me, having a band, it was women, children and musical instruments first – racing to the music closet and grabbing one valuable guitar after the next and laying them on the dining room table, followed by an expensive mixing board for the band, then dashing to closets to rescue shoes in Janie’s closet and mine. The kids did some frantic version of the same. And then came the pressing question: What do we do with ourselves, and Emma’s 7-month-old puppy, Nina?
Now, I have to admit that I had daydreamed that morning about a what-if scenario of a dire scenario, and placed our aluminum ladder on the back porch – we could all climb carefully 10 feet up to our flat roof over the porch, puppy and all, and be safe. But with 75 MPH wind gusts, and water now knee-deep outside, this did not seem like the amazing plan it had in my mind 10 hours earlier. With Janie calling in advice from afar, and now brackish brown floodwater rising above our feet, we settled on the recently built kitchen island as our best option – our very own unwanted island in the storm.
At this very moment, smoke started coming out of a place you typically don’t see it– our dishwasher, which though not in a cycle apparently wasn’t taking kindly with flood water immersing the wall outlet in back. Without missing a beat, Davey dashed to the fuse box in the garage hallway and threw the main breaker to the house – plunging us into darkness but eliminating any chance the dishwasher might blow. Meanwhile, I grabbed snacks and drinks, Emma got Nina’s wire crate, and up we went – like a wayward crew of castaways from a Gilligan’s Island reboot. And there we stayed from about 10:30 p.m. through the night. We still had Internet service so we watched news updates and King of Queens reruns on my iPhone through the wee hours. And speaking of wee hours, you pretty much had to hold it.
We watched the water rising above our floorboards through high tide around 2 a.m. when Davey alerted us that a friend had a kayak and could come get us. Emma was on board. For me, it was “yeah – no” I explained we weren’t going out in a river of front-yard darkness with who-knows-what Florida reptiles or power lines lurking under the swamp water. So we waited, and waited and waited some more for any sign the dirty water that had so effortlessly taken up residence in our house was receding.
Around 5 a.m. came the sign we were waiting for - I noticed one of my red-white-and-blue Fender guitar picks had started slowly floating our way from the family room, following a new path in the water, which was no longer rising upward but apparently making its long-awaited exit toward the hallway into the garage. It was a little dingy of a good-news mission amid the mayhem – inching along the length of the island and, following the prevailing current, making a slow right turn toward the kitchen hallway and garage – and then out of sight. But the guitar pick was our sign. The water level had started to dip and we were now ready to make our get-away.
Emma had been texting her sister Julia nearby in higher-ground Allendale through the night and if we could make it there – a short drive away – we could find refuge and a place to get some much-needed sleep. Davey texted his friend Mac, who said if we could get to a point about a mile away he’d pick us up and get us there. So, as daylight appeared just before 7, and knowing another high tide was due at 10, we packed needed belongings in backpacks and carry bags. Davey carried the dog crate, while Emma held Nina and off we went – three solitary figures and a little dog setting out in the strange stillness of the outside world, walking around the river still out front of our house.
As we made our way, I had an image of Stephen King’s "The Stand," where protagonists set off on foot across the country amid widespread devastation for distant Colorado and newfound hope with mystical Mother Abigail. In this case, we just needed to reach the Snell Isle Bridge, We made it only three blocks. A huge, impassable flood river lay ahead, so I suggested we double back and take a back route that we often drove as a shortcut. But before we could implement that plan, a kindly passerby in a truck slowed and said there was no way off of Snell Isle – and nobody was allowed on. Once again, we were absolutely fu…forced into the realization that our only option was to return home and wait it out.
But then came a call from Janie. She had reached our across-the-street neighbors who had evacuated and whose house, built on a higher grade, had not flooded. They would text the code to their garage door. We could get into their house with AC and a place to sleep. And that’s what we did – marking the first of so many uplifting gestures to come in the days that have followed.
I’ll cut to the chase. We lost a lot of possessions – two cars in the driveway, more than
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Courtesy Dave ScheiberA pile of furniture destroyed in Helene's floodwaters half of our furniture in the house ruined by disgusting flood water, the smoking dishwasher, our washing machine (the dryer on top survived), two refrigerators, a fully stocked freezer chest in the garage that somehow was upended by the water, band speakers, numerous precious mementos in lower file drawers, and calling to mind Trace Adkins’ 1990s country hit, Every Light in the House is On – our version was: every rug in the house is gone. There are several small mountains of cast-off pieces of our life in the front yard, and insurance claims waiting to be processed.
But things can be replaced. And what I’ll remember is the outpouring of mind-blowing amount of helping hands from family and friends, who just started showing up Friday afternoon when the police began allowing people onto Snell Isle again – and all the texts and messages from family and friends asking how we were doing, concerned from TV news reports from a distance. We just finished Day 3 of the dreary and taxing process of checking everything in the house for damage – and getting whatever is documented and outside.
I’ll also remember one other thing. Friday night, just about 24 hours after the flood hit, I was using a loaned Shop-Vac to get remaining floodwater off of the floor in Emma’s bedroom. I had turned down an offer to sleep at Julia’s house to do the additional cleanup, with plans to spend the night across the street in the neighbors’ empty house. Otherwise, in a fortunate twist of fate, I would not have been there for what happened next. I heard an unsettlingly loud bang and stopped the Shop-Vac, Then came another, louder bang – more like a fireworks blast.
I quickly looked out the window and saw flames next door leaping skyward. I knew our neighbor Michelle, with whom we had been texting all night during the flood, and her pets had already been picked up by family but I’d also heard of a terrible flood phenomenon – houses catching on fire due to electrical surges when the power is turned on.
I raced outside with my phone having already punched in 911 and saw it was her car
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Courtesy Dave ScheiberDave Scheiber's neighbor's car burns during Heleneparked close to the house – but not THE house, thankfully – fully ablaze. The operator went through the checklist of questions as I tried to impress upon her that the flames were virtually touching the garage door – she was a calm pro and sent a text, which allowed her to view the flames and see the danger for herself, assuring me that fire engines were already en route.
In several minutes, three trucks, sirens wailing, roared up as firefighters expertly went about their business, extinguishing the inferno in minutes before it could reach the eves and start an all-out house fire. As that was happening, I called the owner to deliver the shocking news, and she raced back to the house with her family in time to see the pale shell of what had been a brand-new car.
So I guess the point of it is there’s always somebody who has it harder than you think
you may. So many people here – and beyond in the hurricane’s path – are going through an unprecedented experience that we’d previously only seen in TV news reports.
But what matters most in times like these is not what you lost but the reminder of so much that you still have. And hey, Emma, Davey and I will always have that memory, too, of our night on the island watching the floodwaters rise.
Dave Scheiber is a longtime journalist and freelance writer based in the Tampa Bay Area. Scheiber is the winner of numerous large-circulation national writing honors, including first place in the National Headliner Award for sports features and the Associated Press Sports Editors’ first place for best feature, as well as co-author of several books.