Franklin County welcomes Milton evacuees
It isn’t often that Franklin County is a place where people come to when there is a hurricane. More often it is where they flee from.
But in the case of last week’s Hurricane Milton, evacuees from central and south Florida flocked here to avoid the ravages of the pending hurricane, zeroing in on the very portions of the Gulf Coast that a few weeks earlier had been slammed by Hurricane Helene.
The county waived rules forbidding overnight stays by campers in public areas, and directed them to the parking lot of the Kendrick Ballpark Complex outside Carrabelle.
In the days before the storm, each of the hotels and motels in the area, including Port St. Joe and as far west as Destin and beyond, were booked solid, leaving desk clerks to advise that evacuees consider short-term rentals.
“We’ve never had this level of evacuees in 17 years at Water Street,” said Leigh Coble, regional manager for the Water Street Hotel and the Coombs Inn, both in Apalachicola.
She said that the hotel waived the cancellations fees for guests who decided against coming down for vacation, because the rooms could be immediately rebooked, and others who had arrived were able to check out a day early if they wanted to get moving and head even further north or west.
One such couple, who stayed at Water Street, Alaina Bass and Russell Wright, from Tampa, and their 4-year-old daughter Cali Wright.
Their neighborhood had largely been spared Helene’s wrath, and while Bass, a native Floridian who had never previously evacuated, even though she grew up near the beach, this time she and her partner decided to leave.
“The way they’ve been talking about this one, we didn’t want to take the risks,” she said.
Bass, who works as a legal assistant for the state attorney’s office in downtown Tampa, was given the freedom to leave, and Wright had similar liberty as a data manager for a clinical research company, so they headed up to Mountrie, Georgia to be near his family, and stopped in Apalachicola along the way.
Also staying at Water Street, because he was able to score the last available room, was John Kelton, who has worked as an assistant park ranger at Dr. Julian Bruce St. George Island State Park since 2008. Unlike three previous occasions, when he had to evacuate his RV, park officials allowed it to stay, but required that he leave the park. The same rule applied to the dozens of RVs that camp on the 60 sites at the park.
Aware of the growing number of evacuees, particularly since a close friend from seminary, Michael Alford, heads a prominent congregation in St. Petersburg that had already been hard hit by Helene, The Rev. Stephen Pecot, pastor at Apalachicola’s Trinity Episcopal Church, set about making sure that the church became a welcoming place for Milton evacuees.
On Oct. 9, he invited these evacuees to a morning prayer service, and to a community prayer service that evening, which was followed by a games night and supper in the adjacent Benedict Hall.
Cindy Haas, from St. Pete, who also had been spared damage from Helene, said she felt it was wise to leave. “My gut told me to get out as it wasn’t playing around,” she said, so she headed to Apalachicola, a place she was fond of from an earlier visit.
The trip to a room at the Coombs Inn only took her five hours, but it was scary for a while because so many gas stations were closed, but as she neared here, she found one.
John and Jean Gieselman, from Daytona Beach Shores, have a best friend who is sister to June Quinn, co-owner of Apalachicola’s Majestic Jewell, so the retired flight attendant and contractor headed this way, even staying in their car one night before reaching here.
In the case of Michael Alford, priest at the Cathedral Church of St. Peter in St. Petersburg, he, wife Rebecca and college-aged daughter Grace knew well the looming threat, as many of the church’s parishioners had been hit hard by Helene.
“Thirty percent of the congregation got flooding in that historic storm surge,” said Alford.”Some lost everything they had.”
“This was going to be the first direct hit of a potential Category 5,” he said. “We didn’t think it was wise to stay.”
In his previous career as a lawyer, Alford had been in South Florida when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992. “I didn’t want to do it again,” he said.
The couple’s son, a student at Appalachian State University, was in Boone, North Carolina when Helene hit, as was at the couple’s home there. While it was for the most part spared, the suffering and devastation in the region was something the Alford’s were learning directly about.
Alford said he prayed but not for the storm to perform miracles that logically mean someone else has to endure a nightmare.
“It’s not because God is smiting us, it’s because we live near the coast,” he said. “And we choose to live here despite that.
“I believe in praying for protection,” Alford said. “I don’t believe in praying that it go somewhere else. We pray to endure what cannot be avoided.”
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.