Hurricane Michael of 2018 destroyed Mexico Beach and the earlier residents are unable to return because of high costs

The height of new homes under construction now are at least 8 feet. Four years earlier, Hurricane Michael destroyed this blue-collar beach town in the Gulf of Mexico and the belongings of residents were spread across the two-lane highway. The old-style Florida cinderblock and stucco cottages are being replaced with stronger more elevated homes that conform to Florida’s latest coastal building codes to be in a better position to withstand powerful winds and storm surges. These new homes are proof of the resilience of some of the locals but they are also bigger and more expensive. As a result, many of the previous owners found themselves priced out. It is obvious. Mexico Beach is not the only coastal town in the U.S. struggling with affordable housing. There is no doubt that prices have skyrocketed in seaside communities from California to North Carolina. Big corporations are buying up properties and those who work from home are trying to buy second homes. Hurricane Ian of 2022 devastated portions of southwest Florida. These forced many residents to leave for good. A tiny Florida beach town is rebuilding after a hurricane. Is it becoming a preserve of the rich? .

The climatic disaster left a bad taste in the mouth for the residents. They had to battle innumerable issues like insurance, government bureaucracy apart from rising prices, construction costs, supply chain problems and labor shortages. The pandemic added to their miseries. In October 2018, Mexico Beach was a quaint and sleepy beach town on a stretch of the state’s northern Gulf coast. Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm with 160 mph winds and a 14-foot storm surge, devastated the city. It uprooted the pier, toppled the city’s water tower, and demolished the town’s police station, grocery store and hardware store. In 2016, the city’s website said Mexico Beach did not even have a set of traffic lights. Michael damaged or destroyed most of the structures of the city and the population of full-time residents dropped drastically. Rebuilding was a massive exercise and Mexico Beach now has a bank, a gas station, a restaurant, a hotel and about 900 residents. It has received federal funding to restore water and sewer mains, dredge debris from its canals, restore its beaches and build public parks. It is all about the basic needs for survival.

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The warblers knew and flew away one day before April 2014 tornado struck

#Warblers Birds can sense some extreme changes in the environment and take evasive action as has been revealed by five golden-winged warblers that flew way from their nest just one day before the tornado struck in April 2014.
This s a finding of US scientists who have indicated that tracking data shows that these birds "evacuated" their nesting site and the geolocators also revealed that the birds left the Appalachians and flew 700-Km south to the Gulf of Mexico. Warblers are very tiny songbirds weighing about nine grams.
The next day, devastating storms swept across the south and central US.
Incidentally, these birds had completed their seasonal migration just days earlier and had settled down to nest after a 5,000-Km journey from Colombia.
In the opinion of ecologists, these birds - and others - may sense such extreme events with their keen low-frequency hearing.
The incident has come to light because of Dr Henry Streby of the University of California, Berkeley – he wanted to find out if tracking the warblers was even possible. This was just a pilot season for a larger study that was about to begin. He had been engaged in this work with colleagues from the Universities of Tennessee and Minnesota and had tagged 20 golden-winged warblers in May 2013, in the Cumberland Mountains of north-eastern Tennessee.
These birds are usually seen around the Great Lakes and the Appalachian Mountains, where they nest and breed every summer and, after disappearing to Colombia for the winter, 10 of the birds came back in April 2014. The team was in the field observing them when they received advance warning of the tornadoes and the warblers fled.