‘I Got Stuck’: In Poor, Rural Communities, Fleeing Hurricane Michael Was Tough

Gene Bearden returned to his mobile home on Thursday in Panacea, Florida, after fleeing Hurricane Michael.

PANACEA, Fla. - Orders were reduced to mobile home residents when the threat from Hurricane Michael approached in the Gulf of Mexico: get out. Get out now.

The evacuation mandate came to Gene Bearden, 76, in this blink of an eye city with an aspiration name south of Tallahassee and in an area where a storm surge of up to 13 feet had been predicted.

Mr. Bearden wanted to leave. In fact, he had wanted to leave the Panacea for four years, but he had not gathered the financial means to do so, and the arrival of a category 4 hurricane did nothing to change that.

Versions of its history developed on the eastern edge of the Florida Panhandle, home to modest coastal communities where people who already had bad luck had little means to escape the storm's wrath.

Mr. Bearden had not planned to stay at Panacea when he visited his aunt in 2014. But when he tried to renew his driver's license, he found a problem with his birth certificate, which he could not fix unless he went to Atlanta. He was born in Georgia. He could not do it there. So he stayed, without a license, in a trailer park here.

"I got stuck," he said.

Kathy Weir and Jodi Connett returned to the flooded house of Mrs. Connett's boyfriend in Panacea.

With the coming storm this week, the sheriff's deputies showed up on Wednesday to get the residents out. Mr. Bearden explained why he could not just walk away. A friendly deputy found a solution, Mr. Bearden said: He wrote him a letter authorizing him to drive, without a license and without current vehicle registration, to a place far enough north to be sure. Mr. Bearden packed a white van and drove, but only to the next city, Medart, where the storm rode inside his parked truck.

"It was not fun," he said Thursday, back in the RV camp, now almost completely empty. "Everyone left, they had to."

The water was thrown towards the Panacea, converting the roads into canals before the swell diminished in the early hours of Thursday. Neighbor after neighbor described how high the water had come: on his knees, his waist, his chest, higher than most of those who had seen it before. By Thursday morning, the streets shone with black mud. They stank of standing water.

Even so, the residents felt fortunate that Michael forgave them the worst of the destruction.

"It was not as bad as it could have been," said Jack Cattledge, 71.

During the storm, he received his friend, Tony Young, another RV camp resident, and Mr. Young's girlfriend. By Thursday, they were back at the camp, Mr. Cattledge smoking a cigarette while Mr. Young, 73, raked the leaves and swept the trash to order his camp. Both men said they were military veterans.

"I'm still going to lose about $ 1,000," Cattledge said of the damage to the bottom of his camper. "And another $ 300- $ 500 in groceries."

His freezer was full of hamburgers, sausages and frozen pizzas. He was determined to save something, anything, for later, but for now he was too afraid to open the fridge and count his losses.

A few kilometers to the south, at the Ochlockonee Bay Holiday Camp, the pier was destroyed, a portion of it flew half of a football field. Only part of a swing remained, although the remaining campers, mostly empty, had apparently not been flooded.

In other parts of the city, people who were in better condition tried to recover. Jodi Connett, 37, and her friend, Kathy Weir, 57, traveled in a golf cart to Ms. Connett's boyfriend's house, where they picked up a stack of sandbags and examined the soaked damages. At Posey's restaurant, Sherrie Miller already had a team that dealt with a huge fallen tree and was working to get the water out.

At Gulf Specimen Marine Lab and Aquarium, a local favorite for children and school trips, Cypress Rudloe, the executive director, grabbed his muddy boots and went barefoot into a tank. He grabbed a net and recruited friends to move a line, a cobia, an amberjack and a grouper to a tank installed in a generator, so that the fish would not die in calm waters.

"I have not even been home," he said, noting that he had been up all night with a friend, moving supplies along the city streets in a boat.

For Mr. Bearden, who served in Vietnam, the situation was more acute. His refrigerator full of food had already been spoiled, he said. He had a little water. But everything that was close was closed.

Meanwhile, he said, he is fighting a recurrence of prostate cancer. Live in Social Security.

He moved a tree branch that had blocked the door of his caravan. The water entered the back, which caused a disaster that did not want to let outsiders to see it.

"It's too messy," he said.

So he sat on a wooden picnic bench outside, next to a grill and plastic boxes of Dollar General, lit a cigarette and looked around.

"There is not a high point around here," he said.