Florida Enters Recovery Phase Following Hurricane Helene – RVBusiness – Breaking RV Industry News
TAMPA, Fla. – It seems “hundreds” of travel trailers are being made available to Florida residents for housing following displacement from their homes by Hurricane Helene, although information regarding where the trailers are coming from is difficult to obtain.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in a video published online by Tampa Bay NBC affiliate WFLA-TV, said, “We are bringing our first round of travel trailers for people to live in while repairs are being made on their homes.” The WFLA report added, “DeSantis said hundreds of the trailers are already here and hundreds more are coming.”
Meanwhile, Dave Kelly, executive director of the Florida RV Trade Association which works closely with RV dealers statewide, had no information regarding the use of travel trailers for temporary housing.
“I can’t figure this thing out,” Kelly said. “All we hear is that they’re (Federal Emergency Management Administration) going to buy from the area most affected and then go out from there. And they have this approved FEMA vendor list. Almost all of our dealers have signed up for it and they call me and say, ‘When are they going to buy’ and I have to say ‘I don’t know.’ And then they see news reports like this and they call and ask, ‘Where are they buying trailers,’ and again, I have to say, ‘I don’t know.’
He said he has reached out to FEMA but has never been able to get a firm grasp on how the process works.
“I get a little frustrated with the whole FEMA thing,”
For its part, national park and campround association OHI is closely monitoring the situation.
“So, we have received reports from the Southeast showing where the damage is,” OHI President & CEO Paul Bambei, told RVBusiness this morning. “There are reports of death and widespread damage across a wide swath of Helene. Our goal right now is to publish what we consider the five most important things that a campground owner can do to make sure that they have their bases covered on the ground, and we have worked with our member benefit provider, Leavitt Insurance, so that it is coming from an authoritative source, a property insurer. We are also amping up our disaster relief recovery efforts through the OHI Foundation to make a direct appeal for donations and in the process in such a way that we create a little more urgency behind it.”
But it’s too early, he agrees, to actually assess the extent of damage that has occurred.
“I think it was spotty. For instance, the Carolinas have given us a report showing 18 parks that have been damaged in some capacity or another, and we’re in the process of trying to collect information from others as well. Oddly enough, we’re hearing from Florida that the damage was not as severe as expected – not to say that there wasn’t damage. But it wasn’t anything close to what Georgia and the Carolinas and Tennessee experienced. But we’re going to spend the day gathering more information, and we’ll try to direct the funding to those campgrounds that need it most.”
In a press release this morning, OHI Chief Strategy Officer David Bassler noted, “The OHI and CARVC teams have been working closely together since Hurricane Helene to assess the damage across the Carolinas following the storm. More than a dozen parks (that we know of currently) have extensive damage from flooding. We know of at least one campground that has been completely destroyed, and there has been at least one death reported. Most of the campgrounds in the mountains of North Carolina are without power so communicating and getting updates has been difficult.
“These campgrounds need your help. They need assistance to get back on their feet—to clean up, make repairs and in some cases completely rebuild. With all the many disasters we’ve seen in 2024, the OHI Foundation’s Disaster Relief Fund needs to be replenished so we can provide this support. If you haven’t been impacted by Helene or another disaster and have the ability to give $10, $50, $100, $500 or more, please do it today. It’s when the entire outdoor hospitality community comes together that we are able to support each other in these times of great need. Please DONATE TODAY to the OHI Foundation’s Disaster Relief Fund,” the press release stated.
President & CEO of the Florida RV Park & Campground Association, Bobby Cornwell, said this morning that while it’s difficult to get in touch with parks, he had spoken with a few park owners.
“A lot of it is what you would expect from seeing the news,” he said. “The coastal areas from south of Tampa to Tallahassee, the whole coastal region has had tide surge damaging and flooding. I don’t know exactly the number of parks that were affected, but there were individual stories from five or six parks that were heavily damaged by floodwaters, but a lot of that has already receded.”
He said there was no word of any parks being completely wiped away, but that power outages and flooding were the main concerns.
Mike Shoemaker, who operates at Nature’s Resort, an inland park near Homosassa, is on Cornwell’s board of directors. Cornwell spoke with him after the storm.
“He had a lot of flooding damages. He’s right on a waterway that’s connected to the gulf and his whole park was under water ,” Cornwell said.
Inland park owners in the Big Bend region, where the storm made landfall, reported extensive tree damage from high winds.
Not many parks are located right on the coast where the most severe flooding occurred and many parks don’t have a great deal of structures to be damaged, he said, and he anticipated that most parks would be able to reopen within a couple of weeks after floodwaters recede an cleanup is completed.
He noted that during Hurricane Ian in 2022, several parks were literally wash away.
“That didn’t happen this time,” Cornwell said. “I think most everybody should be able to recover as soon as they dry out. Some of the landscape has changed, for some of these parks that lost trees because of the high winds. A park may not look as pretty for a while, but at least it will still be operational.
Some of the most severe damage occurred in the Big Bend region, he said, in areas such as Cedar Key, where three storms have made landfall within the last 18 months. Those parks suffered major damage, but the area is not densely populated and there are few parks in the area.
Cornwell summed things up this way:
“Overall, most everybody’s going to be OK. Parks will be reopened as soon as power is restored and fortunately the majority of them just have minor damage.”
