- April 24, 2024
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Joe’s NY Pizza & Pasta, one of many local businesses preparing for the worst from Hurricane Dorian, was dark Monday afternoon, but co-owner Michael Bennici and employee Justin Donato were inside, cleaning.
They had been considering opening up the restaurant for a half-day, but the hurricane’s slow, unpredictable churn toward the Atlantic Coast had left them unsure of how to proceed. Their outdoor tables and chairs were piled up inside by the front entrance.
“Last Friday,” Bennici said, “we started closing up for today.” Closing up for a Monday evening landfall which never arrived. Now that Dorian is not expected to make landfall at all, or even affect Palm Coast until Tuesday and Wednesday, Bennici is considering a limited Tuesday opening, and wants the kitchen to be ready just in case. While news about the approaching storm has made business sporadic since last week, he said, it would pay to be open soon after Dorian passed.
“After the last hurricane,” Bennici said, “us and Taco Bell were the only two places open around here. There was a line from here to the oil change place.”
All around Palm Coast, other restaurants and stores were closed, some even boarded up.
The Sprint store in the same plaza as Joe’s, however, was making its big money pre-Dorian.
“Afraid to lose power?” a sign on the door asked. “No problem!!!!!!”
The solution: battery packs. Inside, where employees were wrapping their computers in trash bags—to prevent electrocutions, should someone attempt to reenter the store after it’s potentially flooded—the racks were emptying of the 8,000 milliamp packs, about three full phone charges each.
At Flagler Beach, where dozens of residents and visitors from Palm Coast lined the sides of the roads to watch the water churn high and gray, the threat of Hurricane Dorian’s destruction was tangible, airborne.
Oceanside Beach Bar & Grill was closed, the stretch of A1A in front of it dug out to provide drainage for the storm surge, and owners Johnny and Tony Lulgjuraj had shuttered up the doors and windows.
Johnny Lulgjuraj said he was more worried about the storm’s aftermath; about the power going out and people not having anything to eat. Within the barricaded bar and grill, he said, their chef and a dozen other employees had been preparing food to be heated up and eaten later, when served to locals, National Guard members and residents of the barrier islands. A refrigerator truck was contracted to come as soon as possible, once the winds dropped.
This service to the community is of a piece with the efforts of Flagler Strong, a group of residents who have been banding together to help prepare for and clean up after Flagler Beach’s hurricanes, notably in the wake of Hurricane Irma. The volunteers have been headquartered at Tortugas Florida Kitchen & Bar, where several of the roughly 60 in the group lingered after their last day of preparing fellow residents for Dorian’s knock at their doors.
“We’ve been closed for two days,” said Scott Fox, owner of Tortugas. By the time the hurricane has blown over, he said, they will have lost as much as $90,000 in potential revenue, Labor Day weekend normally being one of their most profitable.
But the time spent boarding up windows, filling thousands of the sandbags lying against innumerable doorsteps in town and evacuating about 30 senior citizens that week, according to Paul Chestnut, operating partner of Tortugas, was worth it.
“The community is more important than just oneself,” he said.
There were other volunteers wearing black #FlaglerStrong t-shirts in Finn’s Beachside Pub, a few minutes down the road, but the bar was not closed. Patrons were clustered on the front steps where other restaurants had sandbags, calling to the news crews from channels 6 and 9 filming in front of the beach.
Fill-in Manager Nick Behling was busy inside. Being one of the only open places in Flagler Beach was smart for business, but had them working double-time. They even planned to be open Tuesday, until 3 or 4 p.m. Then they would board up the rest of their east-facing windows.
“I’m not too worried about the building,” Behling said. “At most, we’ll lose a couple of roof tiles.”
The TVs in the bar were tuned to Channel 9, showing the coverage being shot just outside. The live band had finished its set, so one could hear the classic rock station piping in Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane.”
