TARPON SPRINGS, Fla. — Tarpon Springs has been largely spared many times in hurricanes. Hurricane Helene was a different story.
It is shocking, humbling, and four days after the storm, the extent of the loss is starting to sink in.
On Seabreeze Drive, which reaches into the Gulf of Mexico just north of Fred Howard Park Beach, Maria Tsongranis recalled hearing repeated warnings from ABC Action News Meteorologist Denis Phillips.
“If you didn’t get out, stay where you are, but you’re gonna get flooded," Tsongranis said. “At that point I knew, like I had made the wrong decision to sit it out and stay."
For 47 years, the Tsongranis family has called a house on Seabreeze, home.
“I’m on the gulf but we’re surrounded by bayous, and we’ve got Lake Tarpon, and unfortunately our once sleepy community, yeah — it got inundated with water," Tsongranis said. "Nothing’s ever breached inside."
Not until Helene. That night, she told her mother to get upstairs.
“She’s 87 years old, I should have never put her through that, it was just like last minute, I was not prepped for this one," Tsongranis said. “You could hear just the waves crashing in here and I would look down and I was like, please don’t come too much further."
Tsongranis described the fear that came with looking outside.
“It’s just rapid, rapids were going down the street and I was thinking, you know, like you’re white water rafting down the street," she said.
First, it was racing to recover... then, the realizations that come when things start to slow down.
“Everybody keeps saying like, what are you going to do, where are you going to live? I don’t know yet. I come here, I work all day, with whoever is coming to help me, whoever I can hire or friends are reaching out and really — it’s whatever friends are dropping by," Tsongranis told ABC Action News, saying she's incredibly grateful for the help.
When asked simply how she was doing, Tsongranis said she was ok. Then, she teared up, saying she really hasn't stopped.
"It could have been so much worse," she said.
Neighbors told ABC Action News stories of other neighbors throwing a rope to others, to pull them to safety. Another... having to swim up the street Riverside. It is these stories of survival we will hear more of as each day passes and people process what they lost, and are grateful for their lives.
Further up Seabreeze, closer to Riverside Drive, Kristina and Wyatt Winkle moved into a home four years ago.
“Not an inch of water so far until this one," Kristina said of recent storms.
Wyatt said it all happened so fast.
“If felt like in a 30-45 minute period, 2.5 more feet just shot up and it was like oh, our house might be okay — oh no, now everything’s gone," he said. “I mean septic tank caps, there was gas tanks floating by, chairs, doors, I mean it was surreal. Just seeing all the stuff, it takes everything. Picks everything up that you think is secure and you just feel like there’s no prep that can stop it at that level.”
The days, hours have been spent salvaging what they can, including memories that cannot be replaced. Baby photos. Childhood mementos. Wedding pictures.
“For the first 12 hours it was like adrenaline and you’re just going, and the emotion didn’t hit me until — we didn’t call anybody to come for help and people just started showing up. Showing up in trucks, getting out of their car, and that’s when I was like — she broke down, I broke down. that’s when you realize how bad it really is, when you’ve got people just popping up and helping," Wyatt said. “At first it was heartbreaking, then it’s heartwarming."
The massive piles of debris littering communities across the Bay Area are not likely to end soon. We went to Town n Country, Baycrest, and Dana Shores to see how those areas are coming together.
