The call came late on a Wednesday afternoon in October, when the forecast cone stopped wobbling and started pointing steadily toward the Florida Panhandle. Tracie Hodson, who runs FavorHouse of Northwest Florida in Pensacola, decided to evacuate her domestic abuse treatment shelter.
By Thursday, her staff had relocated 15 women and 12 children. Some went north in Escambia County, away from the storm surge. Employees drove one family and another individual to a sister shelter in Panama City, three hours east. A woman who had nowhere else to go was placed, with her child, in a general community shelter. Then the staff went home and waited.
Hurricane Isaias made landfall near Destin at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 9, as a Category 2 Storm with 105 mph winds. It killed at least four people, two of them in Florida.
On Saturday morning, FavorHouse’s shelter manager went to survey the damage. The buildings were still standing, but a tree fell across a long stretch of the privacy fence and clipped the back corner of the shelter, popping the soffit loose. The generator had quit roughly 18 hours into the outage, leaving spoiled food in four freezers and two refrigerators.
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.
Our #1 newsletter delivers the week’s climate and energy news – our original stories and top headlines from around the web.
Source link







