Tracking the Forgotten Hurricane

By Nick Smith

One year ago, Hurricane Michael struck Northwest Florida. Although residents knew it was coming, they didn’t know exactly know where it would go. For one terrifying night, the category 5 monster roared through Florida into Georgia, busting down trees and flipping houses. Locals hunkered down, doing their best to shelter from the inexorable storm. After a long dark night with no power, no phones, branches falling and tarps flapping, Michael swept on, leaving terrible devastation in its 160 mile per hour wake.

Even though NOAA states that Michael was the most intense storm to ever hit the Panhandle, now the focus is on new hurricanes and headlines. In our 24/7 high speed news cycle world, the people affected by the storm are in danger of being left behind without the help they need.

‘It’s amazing how little recovery there is,’ says Carrie Lee Hunter, a young, Atlanta-based filmmaker who has spent months interviewing survivors for her hard-hitting documentary Blue Tarps: This is Over Six Months After Hurricane Michael. ‘The government’s not doing its job really. There should be a bipartisan effort to get resources in.’

Blue Tarpshas been shown in movie theaters in Fort Walton Beach and Tallahassee. Hunter and co-director Austin Hermann are still working on the 55-minute film, responding to audience reactions as they hone their story of survival, neglect and the battle against nature’s harsh odds.

‘It’s not my story to mold or make people feel different,’ says Hunter, who was inspired by the PBS documentary series POVfor this film’s approach. ‘I follow [the subjects] through a piece of their day. I let them tell the story themselves.’ Over the course of three months the filmmakers worked nonstop, coming home from their day jobs to spend hours every night on the project. ‘People are hurting now,’ Hunter explains. ‘I needed to get the message out, that was a motivation to get it done.’

Even after a year, there are families living in tents or roofless houses. Whether they have insurance or they’re poor with no safety net, financial aid has been a long time coming. ‘In one of the stories toward the beginning of the film,’ says Hunter, ‘there’s a woman married with kids, she had good insurance, she was able to rent a condo when her house was hit. She couldn’t get a contractor and spent six months waiting for her insurance money.’ In the film, Hunter compares this struggling middle class family with those from significantly poorer areas. ‘They were already living on the edge,’ she says. ‘Michael kicked them over the cliff.’

The directors decided on the film’s title because their interviewees kept talking about their fragile tarps. Every time it rained, they could hear the tarps flapping over and over. It was like a nightmare.

Aside from the intense schedule, the filmmakers had other challenges. One group of people were in a remote farming area that was hard to get to, but they were so frustrated with the slow rate of recovery that they got into cell phone reach because they wanted their story to be told. ‘People forget that parts of Northwest Florida are very rural,’ says Hunter. ‘There are still trees hanging over some back roads, ready to fall.’

As the trees drop, hope rises. FEMA is nowhere to be found but local church groups have stepped up, helping their neighbors at the same time they were rebuilding themselves. Hermann and Hunter will continue to retool and screen their powerful movie, raising funds for survivors and reminding viewers what has happened – and what will happen again.