Florida digs out of mountains of sand swept in by back-to-back hurricanes

When a hurricane sets its sights on Florida, storm-weary residents may think of catastrophic wind, hammering rain and dangerous storm surge.Mounds of sand swallowing their homes? Not so much.That’s the reality for some after Hurricanes Helene and Milton clobbered Florida’s Gulf Coast with back-to-back hits in less than two weeks.

Storm surge as high as 10 feet swept mountains of sand into communities — in some areas, 5 feet tall or higher.The fine, white sand helps make Florida’s beaches among the best in the world.But the powerful storms have turned the precious commodity into a costly nuisance, with sand creating literal barriers to recovery as homeowners and municipalities dig their way out.“I’ve never seen sand like this,” said Scott Bennett, a contractor who has worked in storm recovery since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.

“Wind, rain, water, but never sand.”The morning after Hurricane Milton crashed ashore, the roads of Bradenton Beach, about an hour’s drive south of Tampa, were lined with sandbanks a couple of feet (less than a meter) high, surrounding some bungalows.The views of the Old Florida beach town were not unlike those after a blustery Midwestern blizzard.“The best way to describe it, it’s like getting 4 to 6 feet (1.2 to 1.8 meters) of snow up north,” said Jeremi Roberts, a member of the State Emergency Response Team surveying the damage that day.Another hour south, Ron and Jean Dyer said the storms blew about 3 feet (0.9 meters) of sand up against their condo building on Venice Island.“The beach just moved over everything,” Ron Dyer said.It had taken dozens of volunteers armed with shovels and wheelbarrows two days to dig all the sand out of the condo’s pool after Hurricane Helene, only to see Milton fill it back in, he said.“They just kept digging and wheeling and digging and wheeling.

… They were there for two days doing that,” he said.“We got to do it all over again.”Storm recovery contractor Larry West...