Many of the million-dollar houses lining South Dundee Street in Tampa’s Sunset Park Isles neighborhood appeared to be hosting one huge outdoor garage sale this week.
Piles of chairs, tables, mattresses, bookshelves, chests of drawers, sofas and other household items sat unattended in the gathering dusk on Thursday evening – but these articles bore no price tags. They had been irreparably damaged by the massive storm surge that engulfed much of south Tampa in late September when Hurricane Helene barreled past the Tampa/St Petersburg metropolitan area, and their owners had stockpiled the discarded furniture for retrieval by sanitation workers.
The double whammy that Hurricanes Helene and Milton inflicted on Florida’s Gulf coast in a span of 14 days has affected Floridians from all walks of life, and hundreds of thousands now face a costly task of repair and reconstruction.
The aftermath of the storms has also refocused attention on the relatively low percentage of people who are covered by flood insurance in the event of such extreme weather events – and whether local and state government officials are doing enough to encourage homeowners to acquire such protection.
“No one in Florida lives more than 70 miles from a coast, but because many people aren’t technically required to have flood insurance, they don’t purchase it,”…
