Dozens Still Missing as Hurricane's Death Toll Rises

PANAMA CITY, Fla. — Nicholas Sines was last heard from at his tiny apartment in Panama City more than a week ago. As Hurricane Michael was bearing down on the Florida Panhandle, his mother, Kristine Wright, urged her son to get out before it was too late. “I begged him,” she said. “Please go to a shelter.”

“I’m staying here,” he told her.

Wright still has not heard from him. She has gone on Facebook several times in recent days, pleading for help.

“My son is still missing,” she said in one post. “Today is Day 6 with no word from my son,” she wrote Tuesday afternoon.

Sines, 22, is among dozens of people still unaccounted for since Michael roared through Florida and surrounding states last week, knocking out power lines and cell towers and leaving a trail of wreckage still being searched by rescue crews.

Many of those missing, in the moments before they lost communications with friends or relatives, had appeared to be in dire circumstances. Some talked about how their walls were caving in or how they regretted staying for the storm. Others said the Category 4 hurricane’s winds were peeling off their roofs or splintering the roads in front of them.

But in a storm zone that stretches across hundreds of miles and thousands of battered structures and streets, word about their fates has been slow in coming. Cellular service remains spotty, rescue crews are making slow progress, and grisly rumors are common.

The death toll rose to at least 29 on Tuesday, including at least 15 here in Bay County and 19 statewide; many believe the toll will surely increase again.In places like Mexico Beach, where authorities have said as many as 46 people are missing, families and emergency workers fear that more bodies are buried in the fields of split wood and twisted metal — or, just as likely, washed out into the Gulf by the storm surge that swept through town.

And so families have often been left to post desperate pleas on Facebook or to try to reach emergency officials by phone or by walking into offices and command posts. Although more news is coming each day, especially as electricity and phone service are gradually restored across the Panhandle, many continue to wait.

“I’m not sleeping; I’m not eating,” said Wright, who has been trying to make the roughly 60-mile trip each day from her home in Freeport, Florida, to the place on Northeast Avenue in Panama City where her son was last seen. “As his mother, my heart hurts.”

In an interview Tuesday, she described Sines — he is slightly over 6 feet tall, she said — and her voice broke.

“He’s my son,” she said finally.

Authorities insist that they have not given up on finding people alive, whether in collapsed buildings or simply unaccounted for somewhere.

A search-and-rescue team from Ohio worked in Mexico Beach on Tuesday, as did rescue workers from the Florida cities of Sarasota and Miami. A helicopter flew low overhead. The Florida Department of Health, meanwhile, was offering an online form for reports of people missing, trapped or otherwise in need of help.

“We’re going to go as long as possible,” said Dr. Jay Radtke, the medical examiner for the region that includes Bay County. “In a storm like this with a huge surge, it’s always a possibility that some people may have been swept out to sea. But we’re not going to go the easy way and just say that happened. We’re going to try.”

Radtke said most of the deaths in Bay County were what he described as “medical” fatalities that were not caused by trauma but were nonetheless attributable to the storm, perhaps because of missed dialysis or a heart attack connected to yard cleanup. Just three bodies were unidentified.

As far as when those missing might be declared dead, “I think we’re still a ways away, until we have a better idea of who is actually missing,” Radtke said. “More and more people are popping up each day.”

They are being found as cellphones sputter to life with restored service, or by volunteers like Eric Sherred and Erica Rodgers, a young couple who returned to Panama City Beach after evacuating to North Carolina during the storm and decided to help find missing residents.

The couple, married last month, have been traveling around Bay County in their tangerine Honda Element, armed with a phone covered by AT&T, the provider everyone here seems to want these days. The phone is their virtual command post, a connection to worried relatives and urgent Facebook requests for “wellness checks” that send them to their next target.

On Tuesday, they spent much of the afternoon sitting in stalled traffic with the air-conditioning running on high, then pulled into a neighborhood in Panama City, hard-hit by the storm, where a teenager named Hailey Hicks was supposed to be. The girl’s aunt wanted to know whether she was safe.

“This is not looking good,” Rodgers said as she surveyed a landscape of ruin just a minute or two from the house. “This is feeling pretty bad. But they are all bad.”

“We just need the one house,” Sherred said gently.

Not all the houses, it turned out, were destroyed. Soon, they pulled up at a tidy home, having navigated a fallen tree and passed a warning sign, posted at another house, that said looters and vandals would be shot. Hicks, 17, appeared in the open doorway. Her father had just left to buy supplies, she said. They had been without phone service since the storm.

But they were OK.

“I feel relieved, knowing that people out there actually care about us,” Hicks said, her grandmother at her side. Rodgers sent a Facebook update about the family’s condition.

They went next to another house on their list and found a cleared driveway and water bottles that appeared undamaged by the storm — signs, they surmised, that this family had also survived. Rodgers left a note on the door: “Lisa is worried about you and would love to know that you’re OK. Please contact her as soon as you’re able and I hope you and your loved ones are all well!” They stopped at a cluster of mobile homes to look for someone thought to be living at Lot No. 7. He wasn’t there, but a neighbor said she had seen him since the afternoon of the storm. They continued walking along sand-covered streets strewn with hurricane décor: shredded cans of Bud Light, an American flag lodged in a fallen tree’s stump. Six days after the hurricane, the smell of ripped-apart pine somehow still lingered.

Sherred mounted a rooftop to help someone put up a tarp. Before they left, a woman demanded that they pray together.

It was, for the couple, a good day of searching, even though Sines’ whereabouts remained a question as dusk — and the county’s curfew — approached. They had looked for him Monday and reported that someone in the neighborhood thought they had seen him. But there was no proof — no picture, no text message and most certainly no voice on the phone.

“We’re about 80 percent sure he’s fine,” said Rodgers, who has been keeping in touch with Wright about her son. “But she’s his mother. Eighty percent isn’t good enough.”