Ariel Lopez and his wife, Tiffany, thought Helene would be like Hurricane Idalia, which brought about four inches of storm surge into their home in Shore Acres, a flood-prone neighborhood of St. Petersburg.
“We figured, we can handle that,” Ms. Lopez said. “But it turned out to be four feet.”
The couple and their four children who live with them had prepared for the storm, putting up water barriers and buying two paddle boards that they could perhaps use to evacuate in a worst-case scenario.
On Thursday night, as the storm first approached, it was eerily quiet. Then, suddenly, the water began to rise — two feet in an hour. They feared it would rise to the roof, and made a decision to swim out to safety.
Outside, the water was chest-high, dark and moving fast. A few times, they both thought they would die. But they were reluctant to frame their flight as a story of heroics and survival. “I’m not going to say it was one of those things we tackled, like, ‘We got this,’” Mr. Lopez said. “The water was cold.”
One of their sons worried that they would all get hypothermia.
Finally, they made it to safety at a friend’s house on higher ground, one street over. Almost immediately, they turned around and went back to fetch their five pets, using the paddle boards to ferry them back.
Even in the safety of their neighbor’s house, though, there were no celebrations.
“We had a family disagreement at like 1 a.m.,” Ms. Lopez said, when their daughter asked why, after so many storms, they had chosen to stay.
They didn’t have a good answer. After this experience, the couple said, they have decided to move inland, to higher ground. There, at least, if a hurricane comes, they only have wind, downed trees and power outages to contend with — not a terrifying surge of seawater.
“I think this was the final straw,” Mr. Lopez said.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
