Data indicates fewer residents than expected leaving Bay County after Hurricane Michael

Jan. 13--PANAMA CITY -- In the days after Hurricane Michael, it seemed impossible that anyone would stay to live in its wake.

Trees split houses in half. Apartment buildings were issuing eviction notices. Winds ripped the sides off buildings, exposing the paint color of every room inside. Nursing homes were buried in debris.

It seemed like there would be nowhere left to live and community leaders braced themselves for a mass exodus. New Orleans lost over a quarter of its population after Hurricane Katrina, according to reports, and some estimate that Puerto Rico will lose about 14 percent of its population because of Hurricane Maria.

"You can drive around town and see that we've lost people," said County Commissioner Phillip 'Griff' Griffitts. "There are apartment complexes without any cars in the parking lot."

But three months after Hurricane Michael, a News Herald study of available data that would indicate population migration shows some people have moved on, yes, but the mass exodus from Bay County has apparently not occurred. And studies suggest the storm will likely not devaste the county's population and might even help it grow over the next three years.

An exact number of people who have moved out of the county does not exist, but a look at school enrollment, voter registration data, water accounts and building inspection data suggests that only a small fraction of the region's population have left the area. A request to the United States Postal Service for change of address information was not completed in time for this story.

Here's what we did find:

* Bay District Schools enrollment has dropped by 2,473 students since the storm.

* About 3,349 water accounts in unincorporated Bay County, Panama City, Lynn Haven, Parker and Springfield have been closed since the storm. Data was not available for Callaway and Mexico Beach.

* Since the storm, 1,299 Bay County voters moved their registration to another county, and 150 voters moved their registration to another state.

All of these numbers only tell a small piece of the story and have many caveats.

Water accounts are perhaps the best example of data with caveats. Shut-offs are normal during any period of time. Some people have likely left and not shut off their water accounts and conversely, there are probably households that are still living in temporary housing in the county, but have shut their water off. Similarly, voter registration is not the first priority for a lot of people and some are ineligible to register. And school data only applies to families with school-aged children.

Plus, there's a lot of fluctuation still happening.

That fluctuation is called "churning" and as Elizabeth Fussell, an associate professor of population studies and environmental studies at Brown University puts it, it's normal after a storm.

"There is always 'churning' of the population after an event in which housing is damaged and destroyed, since residents need to find temporary housing if they can no longer live in their home," Fussell said in an email. "The period of time in which churning happens is proportional to the damage, so that may be longer in this case because there was so much damage. But most churning is within the region."

With nearly 9,000 homes with moderate damage and over 6,000 homes with major damage in Panama City, Callaway, Parker, Mexico Beach and Port St. Joe, according to ECPI data, a significant shuffling of homes can be expected, within and outside of the county. Griffitt's own home was damaged and his family has had to find a temporary place to live since the storm.

But there are already some signs that people are returning. After the storm, the Walton County School District accepted 287 "disaster affected" students into their district, but by December nearly half -- 121 students -- had already withdrawn. Presumably, the majority of those students were returning to Bay District Schools.

Anecdotally, there are also stories of people, such as young couple Joey and Ashley Milner, who have left the county and have since come back.

The Milners left to stay with family in North Carolina after their home was destroyed, but came back when they saw greater economic opportunity in Panama City then where they were.

"(There were) no jobs unless you wanted to work part time at minimum wage and housing there was getting close to what it used to cost to live here," Milner said. When a friend offered him a job with good pay and full time hours in Panama City, "we realized that we had an opportunity to save money to buy our first house if I took the job, so two-and-a-half months after the hurricane, we were back down here and moving back toward recovering."

This lines up with Fussell's findings. She has researched population shifts from every major storm from 1980 to 2012 and found that in low-density counties (like Bay) with growing populations (also like Bay) hurricanes don't tend to set the population growth back.

"The population trend in Panama City has been positive since 2010, so it is likely that people will want to move back, especially if economic recovery is robust," she wrote. "I can confidently say that the pre-disaster population trend is a strong predictor of the post-disaster trend. The disaster is only likely to create a temporary deviation from that trend. If the federal and state governments invest in recovery deviation from the trend line will be shorter."

One study from 2013 even found that a county experiencing $1 million in property damages from storms actually grew 3.2 percentage points more than county experiencing no disaster-related damage over five years.

This is good news for people like Panama City Manager Mark McQueen, who was worried about losing people.

"I thought it was going to be much more of a ghost town, and we've some reduction but not a huge one," he said. "Dillard's was still packed on New Year's Day."

At this point, McQueen feels the numbers are going to start to either stabilize or grow as people come back and recovery workers -- like contractors -- move in knowing there will be stable work for the next few years.

"Dates drive decisions, and by January 1 and the end of the holiday season, I think a lot of people have made their decisions," he said.

Right now, he added, will likely be a period of "slow going" as people wait for funds, both public and private, to hit their bank accounts. But come late spring and into the summer, he sees a big influx of money coming, and with that, population and economic growth.

Research shows mega-storms often come with that kind of silver-lining.

"When hurricanes in the past decade have been very costly, future population growth tends to be greater," one study wrote. Going on to say, "substantial hurricane-related monetary losses over the past decade have promoted investment in those places."

Signs of investment are already popping up. Griffitts said he's had dozens of calls from around the county of from people who see "opportunity" in Bay County.

"We're trying to build a community so our kids don't have to leave," Griffitts said. "We're going to right this ship."

Collin Breaux, Patrick McCreless and Genevieve Smith contributed to this report.

___

(c)2019 The News Herald (Panama City, Fla.)

Visit The News Herald (Panama City, Fla.) at www.newsherald.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.