Large piles of debris remained in Cedar Key, Fla., some two months after Hurricane Helene hit. Credit: Amy Green/Inside Climate News CEDAR KEY, Fla.—Timothy Solano could feel the dread rise within him as he sat with his wife and three young children in the family’s Cadillac Escalade on the two-lane causeway leading into this island fishing village on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Floodwaters had left the road ahead impassable, and Solano, a clam farmer for the family-owned business his father established nearly 30 years ago, could only speculate about the damage lying beyond what he could see. Overnight, Hurricane Helene had swirled ashore some 95 miles northwest of here as a massive, fast-moving category 4 storm, packing winds of up to 140 miles an hour. In the waning days of September, the hurricane would carve a vast swath of destruction from Florida to western North Carolina, causing catastrophic flooding across southern Appalachia. For Cedar Key, Helene was the third hurricane in 13 months. Idalia made landfall near here in August 2023 as a category 3 hurricane; about a year later, Debby hit the region as a category 1 storm. Milton would strike southwest Florida a mere 13 days after Helene as yet another category 3 storm, although that system would cause only minimal impacts in this part of the state. Newsletters We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every day or once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s top headlines deliver the full story, for free. ICN Weekly Saturdays Our #1 newsletter delivers the week’s climate and energy news – our original stories and top headlines from around the web. Get ICN Weekly Inside Clean Energy Thursdays Dan Gearino’s habit-forming weekly take on how to understand the energy transformation reshaping our world. Get […]
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