'Mighty strange': Tiny stretch of Florida coast hit with 3 hurricanes in 13 months

When Category 4 Helene moved over the North Florida coast Thursday night with gusts up to 160 mph, it became the third hurricane to make landfall in the rural and sparsely populated Taylor County in just 13 months.

“It’s the damndest thing,” said Joy Towles Ezell, born and raised in Taylor County and now a resident of Athena, in Taylor County. These hurricanes “come up the side of coast the same way and come in at the exact same spot."

Obliterating parts of small coastal communities such as Dekle Beach, Keaton Beach and Steinhatchee, Helene plunged the region into darkness and further misery.

The centers of each hurricane ‒ Helene, Idalia in August 2023 and Debby in August 2024 ‒ crossed the coast within about 23 miles, according to the National Hurricane Center coordinates. But the calm eye, or center of the storm, isn’t what causes the incredible damage reports that surfaced on Friday.

Steinhatchee:Helene leaves behind 'overwhelming' destruction in one small Florida town

The worst of everything a hurricane carries – its highest winds, most intense low pressure and highest storm surge – are to the right, in the eyewall, the part of the hurricane wrapped around the calm center.

Many in the region are storm weary. They've suffered more hurricanes in recent years than all the rest of Florida's long coastline put together.

Catastrophic winds, surf and rain have pummeled Taylor County and a swath of the coast to the south, stretching past Dixie County and into Levy County. Taylor, with a population fewer than 22,000 and a median household income of $46,000, has been hardest hit.

Ezell evacuated for both Idalia and Helene, fleeing northward with friends to the home of another friend in Tallahassee, Florida’s capital, about 75 miles northwest of the worst of Helene's damage.

Tallahassee had geared up for a restoration effort that would have included 2,000 personnel, including mutual-aid crews from nine states and contract workers.

She kept getting damage reports from her friends all morning on Friday.

“My house is still standing, which is incredible,” she said. “It’s an old place.” She’d been told her roof is damaged, and both the hay barn and horse barn were damaged.

Her neighbor fared worse, she said. A new shop, built two years ago, in part with concrete blocks, “is gone.”

“Steinhatchee is pretty much devastated,” she said, counting off the destruction she'd heard. “Roy’s restaurant is gone.”

In Keaton Beach, where Idalia made landfall, Ezell had heard “just about all the houses are gone.” She'd also heard Dekle Beach, the community closest to the center of the storm "is destroyed."

Helene was the first Category 4 hurricane on record to strike this region of the coast where Florida curves around the northeastern corner of the Gulf of Mexico.

“It’s the worst we’ve seen,” Ezell said. The damage appears to be “even worse than the ‘storm of the century’ in 1993, a storm many long-time Floridians use as a measure for the destructive force of other storms.

An overwhelming storm surge

Helene’s storm surge – forecast at 15 to 20 feet – arrived fast and furious. The tide gauge at the Steinhatchee River rose an incredible 11.4 feet in the span of about an hour and 15 minutes, but then stopped reporting, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Storm surge is a wall of water that pounds into buildings with 1,700 pounds of weight for every cubic yard of water. The northern Gulf Coast, is especially susceptible. A steep but not quite as high storm surge pounded the coast during Idalia.

Further to the south, the storm surge in historic Cedar Key rose more than 8 feet at a NOAA gauge, higher than the record set during Hurricane Idalia last year.

Signs of the calamity appeared as early as Thursday night. The National Weather Service in Tallahassee posted photos taken by a storm chaser that showed a number of mobile homes knocked off their foundations and pushed together in Steinhatchee.

People began emerging before sunrise Friday to check for damages and report to friends who left. “It’s an ugly wind, a lot of rain,” said Mark Southerland, a 63-year-old lifelong resident of Perry in Taylor County. “I just went outside and I have no damage yet. I might get lucky.”

Some counties saw a near miss, but power outages widespread

Helene knocked out power to an estimated million-plus accounts in Florida, according to a USA TODAY power outage tracker. Nearly everyone in Hamilton, Madison, Suwannee and Taylor counties were without electricity.

In Tallahassee, where Ezell and her friends sought refuge, the Leon County Administrator Vince Long said in the early morning hours that they’d heard a couple of reports of trees on structures but no widespread damage to buildings. Emergency calls were lower than expected, but additional damage reports were expected as the day progressed.

“It sort of had us in the crosshairs for quite a while as it moved into the Gulf and closer to us," Long said. “And minor degrees of variation in that track can have a major effect on what the impact is here to us.”

Nearby Wakulla County, to the south of Tallahassee and west of Taylor also had been warned of a possible landfall. It barely escaped landfall, and the forecast storm surge “never really materialized based on the track the storm actually took,” said Capt. Jeffrey Yarbrough. “Our hearts go out to Taylor County, who’s having to deal with it again.”

Why does Taylor County keep getting hit?

Like many, Ezell is perplexed.

“I can’t figure out what’s drawing them here,” she said. “It’s mighty strange to me.”

“I would say it’s rather incredible,” said Jasmine Montgomery, meteorologist with NWS Tallahassee. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it. These storms, more or less, developed in the Caribbean, moved up through the Gulf of Mexico and kept going until they hit land. It’s just the Gulf Coast is prime real estate for a hurricane.”

Much of this really is the luck of the draw, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.

Why does one tiny section of a massive coastline keep getting hit so often? And why are major hurricanes striking an area that has never been hit by such powerful tropical systems since records began in the 1850s?

Huge planetary patterns help steer hurricanes, including powerful jets of air that circle the globe and help govern where fronts and troughs shift in the atmosphere overhead.

“It’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that the jet stream is currently stacking in a pattern favoring those trajectories,” Mann said. For this hurricane season, an emerging La Niña in the Pacific may also have something to do with it, he said.

"Both climate change and El Niño can impact the waviness of the jet stream, impacting large-scale circulation patterns and the way that storms track," Mann said.

The power of these storms is another question, as USA TODAY reported while millions awaited Helene's horrific arrival. The destructive nature of a hurricane is driven in part by the energy it receives from warm water. Temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico have been record warm this year.

"The fact that the storms are so intense when they make landfall because they have rapidly intensified in the Gulf of Mexico almost certainly has a climate-change contribution to it," said Jim Kossin, an atmospheric scientist and science advisor at the nonprofit First Street Foundation. "The remarkably warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico are a big contributor and climate change has contributed to those."

Road to recovery uncertain

Long-time residents wonder how or if Taylor County will recover.

Before the storm Janalea England, who owns the Steinhatchee Fish Company on the southern side of the county, said she had talked to other business owners who said if Helene’s blow was bad enough they doubted whether they could recover and reopen. The community was just getting recovered from Idalia, she said.

Ezell said Taylor County "is going to be devastated."

"It’s going to be a terrible blow," she said. "How many times can somebody come back. How many times can you redo?"

(This story was updated to correct a misspelling/typo.)

Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change and the environment for USA TODAY. She's been writing about hurricanes, tornadoes and violent weather for more than 30 years. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp.