KEATON BEACH — President Joe Biden stopped in north Florida for a whirlwind visit to meet with local leaders and residents reeling from the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene last week.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and John Louk, director of Taylor County Emergency Management, showed the president a FEMA map in a briefing on the side of the road in front of toppled trees and remnants of destroyed homes.

They detailed Helene’s catastrophic wind speed in Florida and explained how the storm cut a path of destruction into the Nature Coast, up to North Florida and whipped through South Georgia.

Preliminary damage estimates are a little over $50 million on the Taylor County coastline alone, said Andrew Morgan, the public information officer for the county’s emergency management agency.

About 250 to 300 homes on the county’s coast were lost or are uninhabitable, he said.

Florida continues to recover in the aftermath of the Category 4 storm, which left at least 19 dead, including at least 12 in Pinellas County — hundreds of miles away from where the storm made landfall. In the Southeast, the death toll surpassed 200 as the need for power and water in North Carolina grew more urgent for hundreds of thousands of residents.

On Thursday morning, the president arrived at Tallahassee International Airport in Air Force One and then departed on Marine One to tour ground zero of Helene’s landfall.

Bill Collins, a resident of Keaton Beach, was on his neighbor’s porch when the motorcade arrived and said he was glad to see the president make a stop in Taylor County.

“That’s what he needs to do. He’s supposed to go through and at least see with his own eyes,” Collins said.

He hopes Biden frees up more federal aid for states hit by Helene, especially North Carolina and Tennessee.

“We aren’t the only ones,” he told the USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida. “We’re all in this together.”

In a post on X, Sen. Scott said he would be filing an appropriations bill to fund FEMA, the USDA and the SBA for Helene recovery efforts.

“During my meeting with President Biden, I stressed that the federal government’s response to hurricanes over the last two years has left too many Floridians, especially our farmers, hurting and with unmet needs – and this must be fixed NOW,” Scott wrote. 

He also criticized the federal government’s response to hurricanes Ian, Idalia and Debby.

“I’ll be fighting like hell to deliver disaster aid to our state, and ensure seamless debris removal guidance for our local communities, and I urged the federal officials there today to put Floridians and all Americans first by doing the same,” he said. 

In the briefing with the president, Louk said that while some of the homes are still standing, they are advising residents to inspect their homes for structural damage.

Biden, who donned a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses, spent time speaking with Taylor County’s first responders, including Sheriff Wayne Padgett.

“He was very nice, he shook all of our hands,” Morgan said.

Biden even sang “Happy Birthday” to one of the first responders.

“He was very supportive of what we have going on,” Morgan added.

The entire visit to Taylor County took no longer than two hours. 

Biden then returned to the Perry airport and boarded Marine One to head to Valdosta, Georgia. 

Gov. Ron DeSantis did not accompany the president on this visit. He also skipped out when Biden came to Florida after last year’s Hurricane Idalia, though he did meet with him after Hurricane Ian in 2022.

“No, it’s just we had this planned,” DeSantis said, when asked whether there was any reason he didn’t accompany Biden Thursday. DeSantis spoke from Ana Maria Island in Manatee County, more than 200 miles away from where Biden visited.

He held a press conference to announce three executive orders related to recovering from Helene: waiving local governments’ rental date requirements; allowing supervisors of elections affected by Helene to set up alternative polling places; and streamlining ports and supply chain operations to mitigate the effects of the port strike and get needed supplies into the state to aid recovery efforts.

Ahead of Thursday’s tour of devastation in Florida and Georgia, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre briefed reporters in the air on the way to Tallahassee airport. She trumpeted how the Biden administration will cover 100 percent of the costs associated “with things like debris removal, first responders, search and rescue, shelters, and mass feeding operations.”

“Still, we know there is more work to be done,” she said. “And we will be here, doing that work, for as long as it takes.”

Ana Goñi-Lessan, state watchdog reporter for the USA TODAY Network – Florida, can be reached at agonilessan@gannett.com. 

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Republican Sen. Rick Scott is set to place roughly $10 million in new TV ads in the homestretch of a Florida Senate race that he is widely seen as leading but that Democrats have continued to make noise in.

The Scott TV buy, first shared with NBC News, will focus mostly on the Tampa, Orlando and Miami media markets, with spot buys in other parts of the state, according to campaign advisers.

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He is running against former Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who has been massively outspent but is getting some national help from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in the race’s final weeks.

The DSCC has pledged a “multimillion” dollar effort to help Mucarsel-Powell, Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried announced Monday in a call with reporters. She was unable to provide a specific figure, and the DSCC declined to offer one. Last week, it said in a release that it was making a multimillion-dollar TV buy in both Florida in Texas but did not disclose specifics.

“That money is coming at the right time, and we are going to use it to make sure that we are building the infrastructure to get Debbie Mucarsel-Powell over the finish line [and] retire Rick Scott,” Fried said.

Regardless of whatever national money comes for Democrats, Scott will no doubt hold his long-running huge cash advantage. Scott has spent at least $8 million of his personal wealth, and the $10 million media buy is as much as Mucarsel-Powell’s campaign had spent total throughout the end of July. Scott’s campaign spent $20 million during that same time, according to the most recently available campaign finance reports.

“Our campaign has taken this race seriously from the beginning. We are in a strong position and keeping our feet on the gas through the end,” Scott adviser Chris Hartline said.

The race itself has been a bit off the national radar, as Florida is increasingly seen as a Republican stronghold. But Democrats have placed thousands of volunteers across the state and maintained consistent messaging framing Scott as “in trouble,” highlighting what has long been Scott’s relatively low approval rating for a politician who has never lost a statewide campaign in Florida.

“It’s no surprise that polling shows this race tied — Floridians know that Rick Scott is far too extreme for our state,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “For 14 years Rick Scott has ruthlessly attacked our freedoms, hard-earned benefits and economic opportunities. He has cut funding for our education, our veterans and our coastal communities as our state continues to face the effects of extreme weather, climate change and an affordability crisis that began under his watch.”

Scott has generally run like an incumbent who expects to win. He has not debated Mucarsel-Powell and has focused on her less than she has on him — a common tactic for a candidate who thinks they are winning. His most consistent message has painted Mucarsel-Powell as “an open borders socialist.”

Public polling in the race has generally had Scott on top, but not by huge margins. He has been up anywhere from the high single digits to only a handful of percentage points. Because the race has been so close on paper, it has fueled Democrats’ message that it is up for grabs.

New polling shared with NBC News from the GOP polling firm Tyson Group has Scott up 46-38, with 12% unsure, an 8-point margin that is among the biggest polling gaps of the election cycle.

Hartline, the Scott adviser, said it’s margins like that that have them unconcerned even if national money does flow into the race.

“National Democrats can flirt with spending in Florida if they want and risk losing incumbent races,” he said. “We will have a big win either way.”

HORSESHOE BEACH, Fla. — It was just a month ago that Brooke Hiers left the state-issued emergency trailer where her family had lived since Hurricane Idalia slammed into her Gulf Coast fishing village of Horseshoe Beach in August 2023.

Hiers and her husband Clint were still finishing the electrical work in the home they painstakingly rebuilt themselves, wiping out Clint’s savings to do so. They never will finish that wiring job.

Hurricane Helene blew their newly renovated home off its four foot-high pilings, sending it floating into the neighbor’s yard next door.

“You always think, ‘Oh, there’s no way it can happen again’,” Hiers said. “I don’t know if anybody’s ever experienced this in the history of hurricanes.”

For the third time in 13 months, this windswept stretch of Florida’s Big Bend took a direct hit from a hurricane — a one-two-three punch to a 50-mile (80-kilometer) sliver of the state’s more than 8,400 miles (13,500 kilometers) of coastline, first by Idalia, then Category 1 Hurricane Debby in August 2024 and now Helene.

Hiers, who sits on Horseshoe Beach’s town council, said words like “unbelievable” are beginning to lose their meaning.

“I’ve tried to use them all. Catastrophic. Devastating. Heartbreaking … none of that explains what happened here,” Hiers said.

The back-to-back hits to Florida’s Big Bend are forcing residents to reckon with the true costs of living in an area under siege by storms that researchers say are becoming stronger because of climate change.

The Hiers, like many others here, can’t afford homeowner’s insurance on their flood-prone houses, even if it was available. Residents who have watched their life savings get washed away multiple times are left with few choices — leave the communities where their families have lived for generations, pay tens of thousands of dollars to rebuild their houses on stilts as building codes require, or move into a recreational vehicle they can drive out of harm’s way.

That’s if they can afford any of those things. The storm left many residents bunking with family or friends, sleeping in their cars, or sheltering in what’s left of their collapsing homes.

Janalea England wasn’t waiting for outside organizations to get aid to her friends and neighbors, turning her commercial fish market in the river town of Steinhatchee into a pop-up donation distribution center, just like she did after Hurricane Idalia. A row of folding tables was stacked with water, canned food, diapers, soap, clothes and shoes, a steady stream of residents coming and going.

“I’ve never seen so many people homeless as what I have right now. Not in my community,” England said. “They have nowhere to go.”

The sparsely populated Big Bend is known for its towering pine forests and pristine salt marshes that disappear into the horizon, a remote stretch of largely undeveloped coastline that’s mostly dodged the crush of condos, golf courses and souvenir strip malls that has carved up so much of the Sunshine State.

This is a place where teachers, mill workers and housekeepers could still afford to live within walking distance of the Gulf’s white sand beaches. Or at least they used to, until a third successive hurricane blew their homes apart.

Helene was so destructive, many residents don’t have a home left to clean up, escaping the storm with little more than the clothes on their backs, even losing their shoes to the surging tides.

“People didn’t even have a Christmas ornament to pick up or a plate from their kitchen,” Hiers said. “It was just gone.”

In a place where people are trying to get away from what they see as government interference, England, who organized her own donation site, isn’t putting her faith in government agencies and insurance companies.

“FEMA didn’t do much,” she said. “They lost everything with Idalia and they were told, ‘here, you can have a loan.’ I mean, where’s our tax money going then?”

England’s sister, Lorraine Davis, got a letter in the mail just days before Helene hit declaring that her insurance company was dropping her, with no explanation other than her home “fails to meet underwriting”.

Living on a fixed income, Davis has no idea how she’ll repair the long cracks that opened up in the ceiling of her trailer after the last storm.

“We’ll all be on our own,” England said. “We’re used to it.”

In the surreal aftermath of this third hurricane, some residents don’t have the strength to clean up their homes again, not with other storms still brewing in the Gulf.

With marinas washed away, restaurants collapsed and vacation homes blown apart, many commercial fishermen, servers and housecleaners lost their homes and their jobs on the same day.

Those who worked at the local sawmill and paper mill, two bedrock employers in the area, were laid off in the past year too. Now a convoy of semi-trucks full of hurricane relief supplies have set up camp at the shuttered mill in the city of Perry.

Hud Lilliott was a mill worker for 28 years, before losing his job and now his canal-front home in Dekle Beach, just down the street from the house where he grew up.

Lilliott and his wife Laurie hope to rebuild their house there, but they don’t know how they’ll pay for it. And they’re worried the school in Steinhatchee where Laurie teaches first grade could become another casualty of the storm, as the county watches its tax base float away.

“We’ve worked our whole lives and we’re so close to where they say the ‘golden years’,” Laurie said. “It’s like you can see the light and it all goes dark.”

Dave Beamer rebuilt his home in Steinhatchee after it was “totaled” by Hurricane Idalia, only to see it washed into the marsh a year later.

“I don’t think I can do that again,” Beamer said. “Everybody’s changing their mind about how we’re going to live here.”

A waterlogged clock in a shed nearby shows the moment when time stopped, marking before Helene and after.

Beamer plans to stay in this river town, but put his home on wheels — buying a camper and building a pole barn to park it under.

In Horseshoe Beach, Hiers is waiting for a makeshift town hall to be delivered in the coming days, a double-wide trailer where they’ll offer what services they can for as long as they can. She and her husband are staying with their daughter, a 45-minute drive away.

“You feel like this could be the end of things as you knew it. Of your town. Of your community,” Hiers said. “We just don’t even know how to recover at this point.”

Hiers said she and her husband will probably buy an RV and park it where their home once stood. But they won’t be moving back to Horseshoe Beach for good until this year’s storms are done. They can’t bear to do this again.

___ Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.