Florida businesses rebuilding after Idalia

Yes, ma'am. We had about 3 foot of water in the restaurant and 4 foot on our riverside hotel rooms. It is full of mud. We were very fortunate that we did not have any windows blown out. I think the water mostly rose up and seeped in versus crushing through. We are pretty far up river. It was about 4 inches more water in the restaurant than we had with Hermine. - Wow. I'm just looking at some pictures of your restaurant right now, and it looks really nice. - It's pretty. - Right by the water. That's beautiful. So what does the recovery process look like for you? What are the first few steps going to be?

We're creating a plan of action to open up our dive bar on the front side, which will be much easier for us just to pressure wash and get open. We're going to get out our Blackstones and start cooking burgers, hot dogs, things like that that we can start feeding people who are there working and just having a place to kind of just take a minute and take a breath. Now, for the inside, we are going to have to remove everything, remove the carpet, and get the black mud out, and then start cleaning. It's going to be weeks and weeks and weeks of cleaning. The hotel, we're going to have to rip out drywall, rip out flooring. We were able to move up all of our soft surfaces. So furniture all went to the second story, so we were spared there. But it's just a lot of cleanup. And the debris-- like, you can't imagine how much debris is left behind in these storms. But I literally have, like, five tires in the backyard, coolers, someone's picnic table, and our neighbor has four sailboats in their yard. - Whoa. Yeah, that's-- you don't think about that, that when that water comes in, everybody's stuff starts floating around. A lot of cleanup. It sounds like you're really, really resilient. I know that-- I've known a lot of business owners. I've lived in Florida. Sometimes people want to ride out the storm at their business or at the restaurant. Where did you ride out the storm?

So I rode out the storm at my house, which is about five minutes from the restaurant. We built basically a fortress when we did our house. We overbuilt it because we knew-- we don't leave for these storms, or we never have. And we were very fortunate. We have a couple limbs in our yard, no water damage, and we bought a generator and was able to-- basically, we're running everything out of our house other than our AC-- so fans, lights, hot water, our well. So we're very fortunate. But there's a lot of people who are completely devastated, have water over their head in their houses, and it's going to take a long time for them to recover. - I love the fact that you talked about opening up the dive bar in the hopes that you could sort of create a safe space for people just to come and decompress, which I think is lovely. Can you tell me about the community, how the community is coming together at a time like this?

Yes, ma'am. We started a group text with business owners yesterday saying, what do you need? What supplies? Because the business owners didn't just lose their businesses. They lost their homes too. We're finding places for them to stay. So they can stay here on site and keep working. Same thing with people who had tree damage where everyone's banding together to find places to stay, resources for them. I've had so many friends reach out, like dozens. Can we bring you water, contractor bags, bleach? What can we bring? And so we're setting up command centers for them to start bringing in supplies so we can get that divvied out. Local churches are coming together to start feeding people. So you don't have to stop. You can just go grab a hot meal and keep working. Our community is absolutely amazing. Everyone will band together. We have a lot of people who are not residents here, so vacation homes. They were lucky for that because they'll also bring in resources to help, as well, because we're very remote and limited here. So when people start bringing in things, I can't tell you how grateful our entire community is. - Anna, you know, I'm listening to you talk, and it's clear, it's go time. Like, you're like, let's just get it done. We can do this. But I'm wondering, emotionally, I mean, this has got to be draining. I don't know what it was like to come to the restaurant and sort of shove open the door and just see what mother nature had brought in.

You know, I was so thankful that all of our hard work paid off. We literally boxed up and moved all of our product. And I just knew, when we were doing it, they're like this stuff's going to float. And I was like, if we can save our product, we can find a way to stay in business and reopen. It may not be the same way we operated before, but you have to have the mindset that we can do something to continue moving forward. And if you don't have that yet, you're going to suffer. And it is very sad. We've been doing so many renovations. We literally renovated our downstairs rooms at the resort, and that was for nothing. But we'll bounce back, and it'll all be OK. And you have to have that mindset. - Well-- and what's striking to me is that, if it's a town of Anna's-- - I know. They'll be back up and running before you know it. - Yeah, I'm booking my vacation now. - I was going to say, we should put it on our list of places to go-- Fiddler's. - Anna King, thank you.

Yes. Thank y'all so much.