September 11, 2017
MIAMI — After the wind and rain had passed, and with the Florida sun shining again, Bruce Mawry emerged from his Miami Beach home to find a grisly scene of fallen trunks, scattered fronds and rolling coconuts. It amounted to a palm tree massacre.
“I was amazed at the number of trees that had damage,” said Mr. Mawry, the chief civil engineer for the city of Miami Beach, who immediately began dispatching teams to tag every tree that could be saved. “Many had their roots pulled out. Even mature trees split down the middle.”
From the retirement communities around Naples to the sprawling white beach of Jacksonville, Florida is home to more than a dozen species of palm trees, which cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $20,000 and are an important part of the image of the state. Perhaps more than any building or home, it was the palms, and a host of other canopy trees, that took the full force of the storm.
Some had their tops ripped clean off, leaving them looking like lonely toothpicks sticking up out of the ground. Others were toppled or split, turning formerly majestic rows of Florida royal palms into mazes of debris. Even those that survived had their fronds battered, all pointing in one direction, a reminder of which way the fierce winds blew.
Along the Venetian Causeway, which leads from downtown Miami to the beach, coconuts littered parts of the roadway, their parent trees torn apart.
In Palmetto Bay, Althea Harris and her husband, Robert, were mourning their garden. They bought their home in January, and continued to nurture their 1.4-acre property, originally planted by a botanist. Ms. Harris, 48, knew them all by name — the saba tree, the orchids, the palm trees.
She rattled them off as she flicked through pictures on her phone: “Saba tree? Gone.Palm trees? Gone.”
The saba tree, Ms. Harris said, woke her up at 4:30 Sunday morning, slamming across her yard and onto her porch roof.
When she went out Monday morning, the tree had snapped, half wedged in her poinciana tree, the rest leaning on her roof. The rest of her garden, she said, was in shambles, with branches and leaves torn everywhere.
Her house was O.K., she said, “just by the grace of God.”
MARC SANTORA and EMILY COCHRANE
‘My New Best Friend’
NAPLES — Gracy Nembhardt and her fiancé, Roger Russell, had fled to the Temple Shalom shelter in Naples on Saturday night, desperate at that point to find a haven from the approaching hurricane. The couple, who are home health aides, are used to caring for people. “You know, we are caregivers,” Mr. Russell said. “It’s embedded in us.”
So when they saw an older couple and their adult son sitting off to one side by themselves, they took notice.
“They didn’t eat, from the time they were there,” Ms. Nembhardt said. “I started going over, prying into their business.”
Everyone got to talking and sharing information about themselves. Ms. Nembhardt is originally from England, and Mr. Russell from Jamaica. His 13-year-old son, Rakheem, was with them, as was Eddie Sanford, a disabled man they care for at their home.
It turned out that the other family, Jake Love and his parents, Richard, who is disabled, and Debra, had moved to Florida from Minnesota just a month ago. They had moved into a mobile home in East Naples just a week ago.
But they hadn’t even closed on it yet and now, with a forecast of severe storm surge flooding in their neighborhood, they were worried if the home would survive. More than that, when the time came they weren’t sure how they would get the elder Mr. Love home. If their Ford sedan got stuck in high water, he wouldn’t be able to walk out.
Mr. Russell was worried about his home, too, in the Golden Gate Estates area. But when both families decided to leave the shelter Monday morning, he and Ms. Nembhardt had a proposal for the younger Mr. Love: We’ll take your father in our pickup truck.
So the two vehicles convoyed together, driving down streets littered with palm fronds, past upturned trees and through flooded intersections. There was more flooding when they got into the neighborhood of doublewide homes. Some of the homes had been damaged.
Both cars made it through, and when they got to the Loves’ home, all was well. A piece of siding had been bent up, and there was a foot or so of water in the driveway.
“I was thinking we were going to come back and it was going to be gone,” Jake Love said. “This is the best I could hope for for this category of hurricane.”
With practiced care, Mr. Russell lifted the elder Mr. Love out of the passenger seat and into a wheelchair. Ms. Nembhardt helped the man into the home.
Then it was time for Mr. Russell and the others to leave. They would eventually get back and find that their home had survived the storm, too.
Before leaving, Ms. Nembhar urged the Loves to get a ramp for their front steps. And she said they would stop by in a day or two to check on them – even though they lived well on the other side of town.
Jake Love had some words, too, as he turned toward Mr. Russell.
“I just have to say goodbye to my new best friend,” he said.
HENRY FOUNTAIN
A Midnight Knock
First, they heard the roar of Hurricane Irma’s gusting winds. Then a blaring fire alarm. Then a midnight knock on the door from first responders.
You must evacuate, they said. A sinkhole collapsed on the side of their building, swallowing six air-conditioning units — and, possibly damaging the building.
So in the middle of the night, about 30 people — some sleepy-eyed, some wide awake and frightened — living in building 8 of an Orlando apartment complex trudged from their home to the clubhouse, where they spent the rest of the night. Others evacuated to homes of friends or relatives.
“It was scary. I grabbed my keys and wallet and ran out,” said Ernest Almonor, a cable technician who has lived in a first-floor apartment for about four years. “You don’t know how bad it is or even if it’s safe to be there.”
Just a day after the storm plowed through South Florida, Irma spewed strong, violent winds in Orlando, leaving patches of damage, nearly 300,000 without power, sheared trees and signs, some neighborhood flooding and, well, a sinkhole.
Throughout the morning, curious residents wandered over to the sinkhole which had opened along the bottom edge of the three-story, terra-cotta building. It created a trench of sorts along almost the length of the building.
Neighbors debated whether it was a sinkhole, as the Orange County Fire Rescue officially described it, or erosion prompted by Irma. For sure, they said, whatever it was had opened and been filled before, earlier in the summer. Central Florida is particularly vulnerable to sinkholes and heavy rainfall can cause the ground to suddenly give way.
“They told us it was serious and we need to clear the building,” said Vida Edward, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor and was among those that called 9-1-1. “Whether is a sinkhole or erosion, it’s dangerous.”
AUDRA D.S. BURCH
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Jennifer Tisthammer was tense as she drove her pickup truck through puddles of water, mud spraying from her tires. Her attention was focused on the two landmarks of the Deering Estate in Palmetto Bay — the Stone House and Richmond Cottage, two stately early 20th century homes that had sustained horrific damage under the wind and waves of Hurricane Andrew.
Ms. Tisthammer, who has been director of agriculture businessman Charles Deering’s old estate for the last 10 years, was the first to survey the damage from Hurricane Irma before more workers came to assess the damage later that day.
She had spent the night at the estate, taking shelter in a research facility a few feet higher than the homes. Her biggest concerns, as she went to examine what Hurricane Irma had left behind, were the storm surge from Biscayne Bay, which the homes overlook, and shutters from a third floor window of the cottage had appeared to have broken off in the middle of the night. The estate had just received approval for new hurricane shutters on the cottage, and Ms. Tisthammer and her staff had drilled, screwed and braced the windows with plywood in an attempt to preserve the shutters during one last storm.
She parked her truck a few feet from the house, jumping out to get closer to the remnants from the storm surge: snarled palm fronds and sea weed, at least a foot high, piled a few steps from the house. The windows, including the third floor one she had worried about, were all fine.
Ms. Tisthammer’s eyes filled with tears as she surveyed the homes, a ripped screen the only visible sign of damage.
“This is good,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief as she gestured to the remnants of the storm surge. “The fact that this came to here, we may not have as much damage.”
She walked through the patio of the Richmond Cottage, laughing at the sight of two blue crabs clinging to the mesh window screen. The doors were still bolted shut behind metal sheets, so Ms. Tisthammer crouched on the floor, peaking through the green slats of the decorative window shutters. She and her staff had spent three days anchoring the artifacts from Mr. Deering’s personal collection inside, storing $100,000 paintings in upstairs bathrooms. They wouldn’t know until later how the basement in the Stone House, with its wine bottles from the Prohibition era and some storage pieces, had fared. But the sight of a dry interior, with all artifacts intact, was a good sign.
“This is all amazingly good,” she said, kneeling in front of the windows. “Wow, unbelievable. Stuff hasn’t even shuffled.”
The main damage, Ms. Tisthammer said, was mostly natural. She estimated that in some parts of the estate, at least 60 percent of the trees had fallen. The sidewalks that led visitors from the park’s entrance to a patch of grass overlooking Biscayne Bay were hidden under fallen trees, palm fronds and debris that had swept in from the ocean. “But nature heals itself,” she said. She let out a little cry of dismay at the sight of a fallen tree in the estate’s heritage mango grove — a tree planted by Mr. Deering in the 1900s had fallen, its massive stump upright on the ground and a gaping hole left behind.
The aftermath, Ms. Tisthammer said, was 75 percent preparation and 25 percent luck.
There, she pointed, on the other side of the tangled mass of trees and leaves, was luck. A massive tree had missed the estate’s oldest building, a house built in 1916 that used supply the estate with power, by a few inches. Ms. Tisthammer ducked under the tree’s trunk, marveling at how the tree had barely grazed the roof. A banana spider sat on its web, untouched by both storm and tree.
“This is luck,” she said. “I cannot believe that. I don’t even know where the heck that tree came from.”
After Hurricane Andrew, she said, the estate took eight years to rebuild, a process that cost more than $8 million. These repairs, Ms. Tisthammer said, looking toward the lines of palm trees that still stood tall in front of Biscayne Bay, would be a fraction of that.
“This may not seem as important because there are no people here,” she said. “But sometimes, it’s the parks that anchor the people during recovery.”
EMILY COCHRANE
Quiet Reflections
ORLANDO, Fla. — The search-and-rescue team from California had been up since before dawn, packing their gear and checking, again, their dozens of vehicles. But before California Task Force 1 would leave for missions in the Florida Keys, they lifted their blue baseball caps and bowed their heads.
“On this day, it would be appropriate for us to say a few words,” said Chuck Ruddell, a leader of the task force and one of the approximately dozen current members who worked on rescue efforts in New York.
“On this day, the 16th anniversary of 9/11, it’s an obligation, I think, for each of us to remind ourselves of those who were killed, recognize those who survived in honor of the sacrifices of the first responders and those recovery workers who were there for so many days,” said Mr. Ruddell, who was among the Los Angeles officials who flew out of the city on the night of Sept. 11.
There was silence that a few tears and “amens” followed.
Although the specialized search-and-rescue task force has deployed across the country — the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, hurricanes including Katrina and Harvey — Sept. 11, it seemed, has lingered over the group more than any other effort. To the members of the task force, most of them firefighters, the losses on Sept. 11 still carry a particular poignancy: 343 firefighters died in the attacks.
It is a number that that many firefighters here can rattle off from memory. Sept. 11, they said, was a reminder of the dangers they could face in their own city.
But after Mr. Ruddell’s reflection, the task force went back to work in a city far from theirs. Less than three hours after the men and women filed quietly out of the convention center meeting room, they were on the road, bound for the devastation in the Keys.
ALAN BLINDER