Tarpon Springs has been largely spared many times in hurricanes. Hurricane Helene was a different story.
It is shocking, humbling, and four days after the storm, the extent of the loss is starting to sink in.
On Seabreeze Drive, which reaches into the Gulf of Mexico just north of Fred Howard Park Beach, Maria Tsongranis recalled hearing repeated warnings from ABC Action News Meteorologist Denis Phillips.
“If you didn’t get out, stay where you are, but you’re gonna get flooded,” Tsongranis said. “At that point I knew, like I had made the wrong decision to sit it out and stay.”
For 47 years, the Tsongranis family has called a house on Seabreeze, home.
“I’m on the gulf but we’re surrounded by bayous, and we’ve got Lake Tarpon, and unfortunately our once sleepy community, yeah — it got inundated with water,” Tsongranis said. “Nothing’s ever breached inside.”
Not until Helene. That night, she told her mother to get upstairs.
“She’s 87 years old, I should have never put her through that, it was just like last minute, I was not prepped for this one,” Tsongranis said. “You could hear just the waves crashing in here and I would look down and I was like, please don’t come too much further.”