PANACEA, Fla. — In complete disbelief, Rhonda Griffin watched as foaming salt water from the Gulf of Mexico spilled into the parking lot of the seafood restaurant that she and her husband own three miles from the open water.
The 41-year-old woman, a sixth-generation resident of this hamlet in the Florida Panhandle named for the supposedly curative powers of a nearby mineral spring, got on the cellphone to her mother.
"I said, 'Momma, you're not going to believe this,' " Griffin said. Worse was soon to come: in 15 minutes, Griffin said, her restaurant's dining room was under a foot of seawater.
"I prayed to God, 'Let it be it.' Well, it wasn't it," Griffin said.
On Monday, like many residents of what is known locally as Florida's "Forgotten Coast," she and her husband Chris were laboring to recover from the freakish weekend trick played on them by Hurricane Dennis.
The first hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic storm season may have been less of a menace than meteorologists had originally feared, but as it cruised for a landfall at Florida's far western edge, Dennis stirred up huge waves in the Gulf of Mexico. Those waves surged onto the sparsely populated, pine-forested shoreline south of Tallahassee, more than 160 miles east of where the storm touched land.
"Dennis was 145 mph [of sustained winds] when it went by us, and it whipped up a big wake the way a boat would," said Joe Blanchard, director of emergency management for Wakulla County. Instead of the predicted 6-foot rise in the level of the Gulf of Mexico, the waters rose 12 feet. "We haven't had this much storm surge since 1927," he said.
More than 100 homes along the Forgotten Coast (or, as some here prefer, Silver Coast) were flooded, as were half of the restaurants in Wakulla County, most of which are located on or near the water, Blanchard said.
In parts of St. Marks, the water for a time was chest-deep. Griffin said she and her husband needed a boat to rescue a woman she knows only as Miss Bernice, who bakes the pies served to customers at their restaurant, the Landing. The 83-year-old woman was trapped by floodwaters in her Panacea home.
"We like to say that God likes this place as much as we do, so much that he protects it," Griffin said. "Maybe he didn't like us so much yesterday."
