When the water receded, it took Mackenzie Spiroff’s new life with it. The stench of sewage and fish clung to her St. Petersburg home — or what was left of it — as she navigated the graveyard of her past before the storm.
Spiroff knew what she needed to save: a shoebox of fond memories, her father’s pottery and the “soggy brick” resembling her record collection. Notes and photographs dried scattered across her driveway, and dazed, the 21-year-old UF graduate baked in the sun along with them.
Everything else, she laid to rest.
“I’m never living in a flood zone again,” she said. “I’m never going through that again.”
Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida Sept. 26, pummeling Spiroff and other state residents with 140 mph winds and an estimated storm surge of up to 15 feet. The Category 4 then wreaked havoc on Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia. With a death toll amounting to over 200, it was one of the deadliest storms to hit the U.S. in the 21st century.
Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Milton brought meteorologists to tears on live TV as it tested the bounds of maximum hurricane intensity. Torpedoing through Sarasota Oct. 9 as a Category 3, the newly weakened storm still piled more panic on the Sunshine State when it hadn’t yet recovered from Helene.
An unavoidable question crossed the minds of those who lost everything: When is it time to leave?
As coastal residents flee the threat of storms and rising seas, inland areas like North Central Florida prepare for a possible influx of these environmental refugees, otherwise known as climate migrants.
In the ruins of her home post-Helene, Spiroff said she would never move back to St. Petersburg.
“We’re going to have to keep relocating and relocating and becoming smaller and smaller and try to find that place that’s safe,” she said. “Eventually, no place is going to be safe.”
Based on the height of a grimy water line, the storm surge had been about chest high — tall enough to reach her stacked belongings. Even the doors fell off their hinges, sodden and moldy on a bubbling wood floor. Spiroff threw everything she owned in a tower of trash, quit her job as a kayak tour guide and left for Orlando to stay with her mother and otherwise live inland permanently.
What she described as poor development choices and a lack of flood risk disclosure from the neighborhood left Spiroff feeling “scammed” into her former home, but she also blamed climate change for being forced off the coast.
“It’s here,” she said. “It’s affecting your family and your neighbors and people in your state. It’s at your front door and literally flooding your house.”
More displaced people will likely follow, said Richard Doty, a GIS coordinator and research demographer for the UF Bureau of Economic and Business Research, or UF BEBR.
Completed in July, Alachua County’s climate vulnerability assessment used UF BEBR projections to examine migration trends in response to environmental stressors, primarily sea level rise. The study concluded that the county could face population growth of 8% by the end of the century as a result of climate migrants alone, especially as more residents are battered by intense storms.
“After Hurricane Milton, there are a lot of people in those impacted areas that are just fed up. They’re exhausted,” said Doty, a researcher involved in the study.
The UF BEBR combined general population projections for Alachua County with those estimating climate migration, he said. It provided a forecast extending through the 21st century and took spatial limitations for county development like wetlands, conservation areas and administrative boundaries into consideration.
However, Doty said the study was also a “visioning exercise” and first attempt at interpreting “cutting edge, if not bleeding edge research” with a decent degree of uncertainty. Creating more accurate climate migration predictions would require extensive work surveying statewide residents on their responses to a range of environmental situations, including hurricanes and sea level rise.
For Doty, it begged the question, “How long will we be able to engineer our way out of this to delay the inevitable?”
But one way or another, he said, people will eventually leave. It’s just a matter of finding out whether they’ll switch counties or leave the Sunshine State entirely.
Alachua County Commissioner Mary Alford said she noticed an increase in climate migration as far back as a decade. Preparing for an onslaught of these new residents will remain a priority, especially in light of the county’s existing housing shortage, she said.
“I do expect to see continued housing pressure for folks as they attempt to protect themselves from climate disruption and the increased strength of storms that we’re seeing,” she said.
Gainesville has also set out to pioneer a vulnerability assessment of its own during the development of its climate action plan. Chief Climate Officer Dan Zhu sought community input on a first draft Sept. 18, and though its ten chapters didn’t address climate migration directly, she said it may be added depending on the next round of public comment.
About 100 miles south, Tampa General Hospital nurse Tania Pike recalled her grandmother’s stories about the 1921 storm that decimated the bay. The devastating surge from over a century ago was the part that reminded her of the “river” coursing through her Davis Island neighborhood during Helene.
Pike, 67, and her husband struggled to wade through the waste-deep flow to take shelter in a friend’s house, fearing electrocution if power lines toppled in the wind. Since settling on the island in 1980, Pike said a flood of that magnitude had never inundated her neighborhood before.
“It just rose in seconds,” she said. “The water was moving so fast you couldn’t see any landmarks. Driveways weren’t visible.”
The couple later ripped out their drywall and hardwood floors, which were ruined by the 8 inches of Helene that seeped into their home. Milton swept through shortly after, but caused no further damage.
Faced with the decision to fortify or go, Pike said the next hurricane season will signal her whether to leave the island.
Former Miami resident Ellen Siegel grappled with a similar choice over 30 years ago. Hurricane Andrew swirled through the city in 1992, the first of many local disasters that urged the 75-year-old to head somewhere “high and dry.”
She chose Gainesville, where she could seek inland security and take environmental courses at the university. Now a retiree and self-identified climate migrant, Siegel said she used to value her career as an investment manager, a feeling that dwindled after witnessing continuous threats to Miami.
“I thought that was really important work, but I kind of started thinking that’s not important at all,” she said. “What is the point of having enough money to live on if where you live is unlivable?”
As an Everglades park ranger for nearly three decades, she said rising sea levels also killed a personally significant Jamaican Dogwood tree, and scuba diving on dead coral reefs only furthered her unease. The ground eventually became so oversaturated with water it caused a septic tank to leak back into her home, the final signal to Siegel that it was time to go.
As a CLEO Institute climate speaker specialist based in Gainesville, she only expects the pattern to gain speed.
“No question about it, there’ll be more people like me who connect the dots slowly,” she said. “More people that are directly impacted over and over again will make that decision.
Contact Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp at rdigiacomo-rapp@alligator.org. Follow her on X @rylan_digirapp.
Rylan DiGiacomo-Rapp is a third year journalism and environmental science major and the Fall 2024 Enterprise Environmental Reporter. Outside of the newsroom, you can usually find her haunting local music venues.
