SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
It's been a year since Hurricane Helene struck the U.S. and carved a wide path of destruction through Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and devastated areas that have rarely - if ever - endured a strong hurricane. We'll hear now from reporters in each of those states and how people are changing their approach to hurricane season. We begin with Grist reporter Ayurella Horn-Muller in Florida.
AYURELLA HORN-MULLER: For Cricket Logan, hurricane season has always just been part of the fabric of life in St. Petersburg, Florida. He's been through every big storm that has hit the region for the last 21 years. They all blended together until last September.
CRICKET LOGAN: Helene was really shocking with the amount of storm surge we took.
HORN-MULLER: It made landfall in Florida's Big Bend, but Helene's outer bands struck the Tampa Bay area harder than any other hurricane in over a century. A monster storm surge inundated the region, killing over a dozen people. It flooded thousands of homes.
LOGAN: All the houses in my neighborhood had had 3 or 4 feet of saltwater in them. So it was just giant piles of everybody's belongings. You know, the houses had just thrown up out on the street side.
HORN-MULLER: Helene forced Logan to think about how he prepares for hurricanes differently. This storm season, he made a plan to store some of his prized belongings, like his motorcycles and tools, on higher ground. He knows the next bad flood will destroy his place completely.
LOGAN: It's kind of like pin the tail on the donkey, you know? Am I going to be able to retire and sell this thing, or am I going to retire because this thing has been destroyed by saltwater?
HORN-MULLER: That's a game Kelsey Sanchez no longer wants to play. She was born and raised in Florida and is now preparing to leave. Sanchez and her husband fled the Tampa Bay area ahead of Helene. Not even two weeks later, they joined the millions of people forced to evacuate again for Hurricane Milton.
KELSEY SANCHEZ: We had no real hurricane plan. We didn't have a go bag, and we were panicked.
HORN-MULLER: Evacuating twice in two weeks ended up costing them thousands of dollars, so next month, they'll be moving to the Midwest. Sanchez says she knows you can't escape extreme weather, but just about anywhere else is better than hurricane-prone Florida.
SANCHEZ: It's so much chaos when the storms hit. People die almost every year from it. I don't want to be one of them.
HORN-MULLER: She's hoping that another storm doesn't make landfall before they can leave. I'm Ayurella Horn-Muller in Tampa, Florida.
EMILY JONES, BYLINE: I'm Emily Jones in Georgia. When Helene slammed into Valdosta, it joined a litany of disasters that had struck the area over the prior year - Hurricane Idalia, a tornado, straight-line winds, a flood, Tropical Storm Debby. Even after Helene, more floods hit.
ASHLEY TYE: We were kind of joking, well, you know, what's next - a plague of locusts?
JONES: Ashley Tye is the local emergency management director.
TYE: Well, now, what was next was a - was the snowstorm of the century for our area.
JONES: Yes - a rare snowstorm this January. The county is about two hours from both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. But inland communities like this are learning they're now more at risk from powerful storms, so local officials are updating their advice. Standard storm messaging recommends stocking up for three days without power. But county spokeswoman Meghan Barwick says Helene proved that's nowhere near enough.
MEGHAN BARWICK: I mean, I was without power at my home for 14 days.
JONES: As Helene carved a path north through Georgia, toppling trees, damaging houses and killing 33 people, the storm taught a cruel lesson in preparedness for Columbia County near Augusta. That community wasn't originally in the storm's path.
SCOTT JOHNSON: We weren't expecting a hurricane to hit us.
JONES: County manager Scott Johnson says many people were not prepared, despite the official advice to have emergency supplies on hand.
JOHNSON: It took us living through it to really understand that you really need to do all those things.
JONES: The storm utterly devastated Columbia County and left many people with almost no way to contact family. The one saving grace was a local broadband network buried underground that kept emergency services and public Wi-Fi hot spots online. So they're expanding that network, and Johnson is advising other officials to take similar steps.
JOHNSON: It's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when it's going to strike your community.
JONES: For his own part, Johnson says he now has a backup generator and emergency supplies of food, water, gas and cash because he never wants to be caught unprepared again. I'm Emily Jones in Savannah, Georgia.
KATIE MYERS, BYLINE: I'm Katie Myers in Western North Carolina. When Helene came up north into the Appalachian Mountains, rivers and creeks burst their banks. Over a hundred died. Water and power and internet went out for days, weeks or months. People resorted to creative solutions to take care of one another.
(SOUNDBITE OF BANGING)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Come get me.
MYERS: Jennifer Rambo, principal of Spruce Pine Montessori School, has put her foot-powered hand-washing stations and extra water away now that the taps work again. But the memories of months without water still haunt her.
JENNIFER RAMBO: Just to think about that now - that we actually did that - is really hard to wrap my brain around.
MYERS: She's kept all of the emergency water stuff. And sure enough, she had to take it back out just in May, when a water main burst in town. She managed to sell it to kids as another adventure.
RAMBO: They were like, this is just like after the hurricane. It's so fun.
MYERS: But it kept Rambo feeling like she has to stay on her toes. She's keeping all the equipment and extra water around in case she or anyone else in Spruce Pine ever needs it again.
RAMBO: I feel like we're still going to have these hiccups in the infrastructure, and we have to be prepared.
(SOUNDBITE OF CICADAS BUZZING)
MYERS: In the mountain town of Barnardsville, Chloe Lieberman prides herself on her off-grid living skills. She is working to expand the town's grassroots aid network, which includes a food donation group and a community lumber mill.
CHLOE LIEBERMAN: We were already preparing to live in a way that would be more resilient.
MYERS: The work, she says, is to think ahead and ahead and ahead.
LIEBERMAN: More natural disasters will come. More challenges will come. How can we actually recover but then keep going?
MYERS: As hurricanes get stronger and impact more people, they are rethinking their futures - whether to move away, beef up their preparedness, dig in and get to know their neighbors or some combination of the three. Because ready or not, the next one could be on its way.
For NPR News, I'm Katie Myers in Asheville, North Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANDREW GIALANELLA'S "TRY AGAIN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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