Words by Andrew Williams
FROM ANNA MARIA ISLAND WITH LOVE
A beach community without a beach is still a treasure. Just ask Darcie Duncan, a successful real estate agent and lifelong native of Anna Maria Island.
“This is a special place,” Darcie says. “I think people are seeing that now more than ever because of the resilience of this community.”
Anna Maria Island, population 1,800, is a funky resort town stretching 7 miles north and south along Florida’s Gulf Coast — 11 miles northwest of the Meals on Wheels PLUS of Manatee headquarters.
For more than an hour, on a brisk, sunny fall day, Darcie takes us on an hour-long driving tour of Anna Maria Island to observe the extensive damage caused by two destructive hurricanes and the ongoing efforts to clean up and rebuild their community.
The town has all the hallmarks of a beach town: ice cream shops, pubs—including one fantastic Irish burger joint—no fries, just chips on the side, no exceptions, a quaint main street, a single community center, tennis courts, an adorable playhouse, grand beachfront mansions, psychedelic bungalows, apartment properties, and modest mobile home park neighborhoods.
However, in recent weeks, swarms of surfers, snowbirds, fishing enthusiasts, beach cruisers and tourists have been replaced by the steady hum of haulers and the drumbeat of hammers and nails.
In the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, workers have continued to toil for hours on end, gathering sand from Anna Maria Island’s once pristine beaches and siphoning it of all manner of debris: glass, screws, nails, shards of wood from park benches and anything else swept into the sand. The sand is filtered, sanitized and returned to the beach.
“This is what they do, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Darcie says.
Crews also work overtime jutting storm drains. The process involves flushing drains with powerful hoses to remove debris and clear drainage lines.
Post Helene and Milton, Darcie recalls apocalyptic conditions on Anna Maria Island — water racing down walkways and into homes and streets engulfed in sand.
Nearly every ground-level structure suffered damage.
“Between two hurricanes, you either had flood damage, wind damage or the pleasure of having both,” Darcie says.
Helene's storm surge flooded homes, cars, and streets with water and sand. Then Milton came to finish the job, peeling back roofs with violent winds and unpredictable micro-bursts of tornadoes, sweeping away a historic 100-year pier, cherished dunes, seagrass, bushes and trees, yanking homes off their foundations, and making their lone post office unserviceable (they are currently using a makeshift location).
On our drive, we witness homes mangled, twisted and turned sideways — dangling on the edge of collapse, sand-filled carports, permanently shuttered motels and soon-to-be demolished mobile homes.
This version of Anna Maria Island is almost unrecognizable.
PARADISE IN TRANSITION
Traffic doesn’t flow as smoothly today, and businesses are still slow to re-open.
The disruption to their way of life is unimaginable. As a beach-side community, they’ve endured their share of storms but never a direct hit, let alone two.
“I've lived here my whole life and never seen anything like it,” says Darcie, who sells properties and manages private vacation home rentals. “When I talk to the few old timers still here, they've never seen it. This [reality] is our 100-year flood.”
It’s a perfect example of the storm's effect on the region and environment in which the local Meals on Wheels PLUS operates. The storm exposed the county’s vulnerability to natural disasters and showed how quickly the wide displacement of residents changes a community.
MORE THAN A TOURIST DESTINATION
As tourism shut down, many low-wage jobs in restaurants, bars, and hotels temporarily disappear; getting those establishments up and running again is critical to the Island’s economic recovery.
“It’s become a very tourist-driven place,” Darcie admits. “When I was growing up, it wasn't like that. It's gotten expensive, and unfortunately, it always takes some type of disaster or situation to open your eyes to say, ‘Wow, this is a great community.’ You're seeing it come together to rebuild quickly, which is fantastic.”
Communities live and breathe beyond the “ebb and flow of residents and tourists.” With less tourism, locals must fight together to shape their community’s destiny. Sadly, with so much displacement, who participates in that reimagining is changing.
Darcie admits the storm took people by surprise. The flooding, destruction of property, homes, and automobiles, and loss of essentials like appliances for cooking food created a humbling depth of vulnerability across the community.
“Meals on Wheels PLUS is amazing,” Darcie recalls, remembering its response in the early days after Milton.
After the second storm, the organization arrived with home-delivered meals, food from its Food Bank, and supplies during relief efforts.
Frank Perry, VP of Strategic Food Bank and Transportation Operations at Meals on Wheels PLUS of Manatee, recalls one client on Anna Maria Island who rode out (and survived) the storm alone on the fifth floor of a two-tower living facility in an evacuation zone. It was her and her husband’s dream to retire on the Island (leaving was like abandoning her dream. Hardnosed Floridians don’t go). With her husband now in assisted living, she lives alone.
Frank volunteered to deliver a package of produce, shelf-stable hurricane boxes, frozen meals, and milk as soon as they could reach her. Unfamiliar with the route, he walked up six flights at the wrong tower before backtracking to gather and transport the items to the second tower. He again walked up a second flight of six stairs before realizing there was a working elevator.
“You do whatever it takes,” Franks says.
A familiar knock on the door is one of the first signs to community members that help is (and always will be) on the way.
“One of the things that I love about this community, and what I saw, especially with this hurricane, is the number of businesses, individuals and prominent people who came to support us,” says Maribeth Phillips, President and CEO of Meals on Wheels PLUS of Manatee. “It was a beautiful thing to see. It just kept coming. People in this community come together during times of need.”
These small (and significant) kindnesses help ease the strain and stress that spread across communities after traumatic events like a direct hit from two powerful hurricanes.
“It's been hard for people to wrap their mind around the fact that every day it gets better,” Darcie says. “Now that they're seeing progress, it helps people have a good attitude and keep moving.”
Little by little, as the dunes of siphoned sand reduce, more young surfers head back to the beach, and business picks up, the hope that the community will return grows.
“There's nothing in a playbook for this. This has never happened. So everybody's learning as they go.”
FIND ME AT THE SUPER EIGHT
While Helene and Milton mostly impacted barrier islands like Anna Maria Island and Longboat Key, individuals in more inland communities share similar stories of how these back-to-back storms rearranged their lives.
Thirteen miles northeast of Anna Maria Island, in the mobile home retirement community of Colony Cove, nestled on the banks of the Manatee River, many residents remain displaced. One such resident is Jeannette Jenkins, who’s found temporary shelter with her husband in the local Super Eight Motel.
“I lived right on the Manatee River; then I had a foot and a half of water in my house from Helene,” Jeannette says. “Then Milton came along and took half my roof off. There are many people like me whose homes have been ruined.”
Jeannette and her husband consider themselves lucky. Their insurance covered the damage, and they are already in the market for a new home.
“It has devastated the community,” Jeannette says of the widespread homelessness.
Colony Cove is home to 6,000 or so residents, occupying 3,000 homes. Among those residents, Jeannette says a small number receive home-delivered meals — though she agrees the numbers should be higher. “We try hard to encourage that,” says Jeannette, a volunteer treasurer for a local nonprofit, Helping Hands, who regularly interfaces with The Food Bank of Manatee, a PLUS program of Meals on Wheels PLUS.
For many, finding normalcy will take time.
“We're still working on getting everything picked up, the debris and everything from people's houses,” Jeannette says.
JOHNNY ROBERTS
Johnny Roberts, a Meals on Wheels PLUS home-delivered meals recipient, lives only a 10-minute drive away.
Johnny fared better than Jeannette. He returned home after evacuating during Hurricane Milton and staying four days in a local special needs shelter, where he accessed an outlet for his CPAP machine.
Johnny lives alone — his wife passed eight years ago — and suffers from various health issues, including sleep apnea, congestive heart failure, and high blood pressure, and has five stents for clogged arteries.
He understands how fortunate he is to be alive. “At this old age, I’m still hanging in here,” Johnny says.
Outside of calls from his stepdaughter, occasional doctor’s visits, a weekly visit from a friend, and visits from a Meals on Wheels PLUS of Manatee volunteer, who, once a week, regularly drops off five frozen meals for him, he’s mainly homebound and spends most of his days in isolation — the red Cadillac SUV in the driveway is a reminder of a time when he had more mobility.
Today, he struggles to stand for long periods, making cooking nearly impossible. He survives on a $1,300 monthly Social Security check that barely covers his expenses: $1,100 rent, $200 utilities, and a $50 phone bill. He also receives $25-$30 worth of food stamps, which only go so far.
“If it were up to me to supply meals, I would eat pizza seven days a week, 365 days a year,” Johnny jokes.
His home-delivered meals balance his nutritional needs (Johnny is admittedly a glutton for junk food), are easy to prepare (he doesn’t have to be on his feet for more than a few minutes at a time), and are a connection to the outside world. His mounting health issues and Milton's destruction of his outdoor space weaken that connection.
“That was a screened, vinyl, windowed enclosure. Even in the rain, I could be out there,” Johnny says. “It kept the mosquitos out and the environment out.”
Milton took his screened porch, where a lone television and television stand sit, exposed to the elements, and swept away his carport.
Johnny remains grateful for many things, including the steady support and presence of Meals on Wheels PLUS. They called before the storm to ensure he had an evacuation plan and were among the first to reach him post-Milton as soon as the roadways were clear.
As a 32-year native of Florida, hurricanes don’t scare him. It’s a practiced stubbornness only a true Floridian understands. Yet, in his stubbornness, he finds comfort in knowing organizations like Meals on Wheels PLUS are a lifeline to the community, there to help him start again each time disaster strikes and there to keep him strong enough to keep fighting and living.
COULD I JUST HAVE SOME ICE
Sometimes, a single story can demonstrate the will of a community to survive and move forward.
All hands were on deck during early recovery at Meals on Wheels PLUS of Manatee. Frank Perry was on assignment to deliver frozen meals to the Citrus Grove mobile home community, which is only a mile and a half from the organization's headquarters.
“We were on site before relief people could be there,” Frank says.
Unlike Colony Cove, the community lacks bells and whistles: no fancy front office, clubhouse, or other amenities.
Frank packed a car equipped with a single contact: the resident receiving the meals and the precious cargo of meals. What he encountered while driving through Citrus Grove -demonstrates “the resiliency of people” in their community.
“There's a gentleman, and he's sitting in his living room,” Frank remembers. “Milton peeled back his roof, and the sunlight was shining through where his roof was onto the carpet of his living room floor; he's sitting in his recliner, eating a lollipop.”
Frank, shocked by the scene and compelled by the gentleman’s noticeable shaking, asked if he could offer assistance, food, water, anything.
“He said, ‘Could I just have some ice,’” Frank recalls.
The gentleman, who had survived the storm alone in the night in an older single-wide mobile home, was an insulin-dependent diabetic and needed ice to keep his insulin cool.
It was a jarring discovery.
They quickly realized there were five insulin-dependent individuals in the community. Frank immediately returned to the Meals on Wheels PLUS of Manatee headquarters, filled bags of ice from their ice machines and returned to Citrus Grove.
“All he wanted to do was keep his insulin cool,” Frank says. “He had no water, food, or transportation. I don't know how connected he was to the world or if he had a television or radio.”
Frank says being there powerfully demonstrates the role of Meals on Wheels PLUS as community first responders.
“We do distributions. We know where people are and what their needs are.”
Being the eyes and ears of the community positions the local Meals on Wheels PLUS to respond to calls for help, no matter the need, in ways that often go beyond delivering a nutritious meal.
If recent history offers any lessons, this will not be the last time Mother Nature forces the organization to change its playbook. What will remain the same is the drive to do whatever it takes.