Left to right: Nic Silard ’24, Jimmy Knudsen ’24, Rachel Mueller ’24, Zach Austin ’21, Vice President for Student Life Amy Falvo, Kate Murray ’24
They showed up at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning in early November and went straight to work tearing out flood-damaged drywall. Temperatures outside the single-story house rose to the mid-80s. Inside, with no electricity, it was sweltering. But the three Eckerd College students and two alumni who had arrived at Amy Falvo’s house that day were up for the task.
Thirty-seven days had passed since Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 monster, brought a 15-foot storm surge to Florida’s West Coast on Sept. 26. Today the cleanup and restoration remain far from over for thousands of people—including Amy Falvo, Ph.D., vice president for student life at Eckerd.
She and her husband, Mike, own a home on St. Pete Beach, just a few blocks from the Gulf. They had evacuated to an Airbnb near downtown St. Petersburg, and it wasn’t until three days after Helene had passed that they were allowed access to their home—the one they had purchased only four years earlier and had completely renovated.
“My first thought was disbelief,” Falvo recalls. “Everything was everywhere. The water had receded, but you could tell how much had gotten inside. The waterline on the walls was about three feet high. Things had floated into the backyard. Our couch was in the kitchen …
“It was overwhelming. You don’t know where to start. And there was no information about what you needed to do. All of our neighbors were doing the same thing … just walking around, looking for what can be saved. I made a beeline for some family heirlooms—photographs, portraits, handwritten notes. Some we could save; some we couldn’t.”
The Falvos removed just about everything from inside their house. But they still faced the hardest job of all: knocking out the water-damaged walls and ceilings. So Amy reached out to Adam Guerin, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Eckerd who had been organizing groups of students, alumni and staff to help anyone who needed it.
Whole athletics teams also signed up and began working on projects across St. Petersburg between Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Guerin dispatched the Eckerd cohort.
“In four hours, all the walls and ceilings were done,” Falvo says. “It was dirty work. There was dust, insulation …
“It just further solidified my love for the Eckerd community,” she adds. “I remember taking a photo of the crew while they were working, and thinking how blessed we are to be a part of this community that’s willing to give up a Saturday to help us in our darkest hour. They were so gracious.”
The couple is now living in their sixth Airbnb. “We still don’t have electricity,” Falvo says. “They have to rewire our whole house.” There also are paperwork issues with FEMA and the City of St. Pete Beach, and until those are ironed out, Falvo adds, “We just keep moving around.
“But for us, the help from the students and alumni was uplifting. It was one step closer to getting us back on our feet.”
The Eckerd students—including Kate Murray, a senior geosciences major from Downers Grove, Illinois—understand that. “I was shocked at how bad their house was,” Kate says. “I work with Amy, and even though she had so much work to do for the school after the storms, you wouldn’t know her house was destroyed. She always has a smile on her face.
“They kept saying that we could leave at any time,” Kate adds. “And that any help is huge. I was so glad we could be there. There are so many people who can’t go through the recovery process on their own. They have kids or jobs, or they can’t do it financially or physically. There are so many people who need help.
“It feels wrong not to do something.”
The other Eckerd volunteers were seniors Nic Silard, an environmental studies and political science student from Annapolis, Maryland, and Jimmy Knudsen, a marine science student from Valley, Nebraska, along with alumni Rachel Mueller ’24 and Zachary Austin ’21—Eckerd angels all.
