Excerpt:
After the Category 4 hurricane made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast and pummeled the Southeast, some victims’ portraits were coming into focus.
A woman in her 70s who repaired nuclear cooling towers and rode motorcycles. A Florida resident who helped her community recover from Hurricane Ian two years ago. A man who had just moved to South Carolina to work as an electrical lineman.
All three were among at least 121 people killed as of Monday morning by Helene, a roaring Category 4 hurricane that has devastated much of the Southeast since coming ashore last week. Officials expect the death toll to continue to grow.
The victims came from at least six states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Many people drowned, and others were killed by falling trees, car crashes under heavy rains and a tornado produced by the storm. A lot of the victims were still unidentified.
The toll is almost certain to rise as rescuers reach communities in the Appalachian Mountains, where devastating flooding and mudslides have decimated whole towns.
But on Sunday, three days after the giant storm made landfall in the Big Bend region, some victims’ stories were coming into focus.
Most of the victims in Florida drowned in Pinellas County, the state’s most densely populated county, which is in the Tampa Bay region.
One of them was Marjorie Havard, 79, of St. Pete Beach. Her son, Todd Webb, 58, who also lives in St. Pete Beach, believes that his mother tripped, fell and drowned in several feet of storm surge.
After raising her children in Ohio, Ms. Havard became a licensed carpenter and traveled the country to repair nuclear cooling towers. She rode motorcycles and loved animals; she had owned a llama, a horse and a mule, in addition to dogs and cats.
“At one time she was pretty darn tough,” Mr. Webb said. “But at 79, the storm took her.”
Mr. Webb said his mother had insisted on staying in her home before the storm, even though she was under an evacuation order. He believes many of her neighbors made the same decision because Helene had been expected to make landfall much farther north. But even so, the record-breaking hurricane — Helene is the strongest to ever hit the Big Bend region — brought dangerous storm surge to the Tampa Bay area.
Aidan Bowles, a 71-year-old retired lawyer who had owned a local sports bar, also chose not to evacuate from his one-story cottage in Indian Rocks Beach in Pinellas County.
One of his neighbors, John Comer, an artist who had also stayed during the storm, checked on Mr. Bowles the day after the hurricane made landfall and came across a harrowing scene: Mr. Bowles had been trapped under a dresser and covered in mud.
“It’s not something you can get out of your mind easily,” Mr. Comer said…
