Historic flooding from Hurricane Helene hits Scientology-heavy Tampa Bay

Although the eye of Hurricane Helene passed more than a hundred miles to the west of the Tampa Bay area as it churned its way north yesterday to a landfall in the Big Bend coastal area as a Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds, Helene’s storm surge produced historic flooding in Tampa and Clearwater, where one of the largest concentrations of Scientologists in the world is.

Last night we emailed Mike Rinder, who lives in the area, to see how he and his family are getting through it, and we haven’t heard back yet. We imagine that people in the area have been affected by power outages even if their homes haven’t been flooded.

By this morning, Helene had moved into Georgia and was downgraded to a tropical storm that is still causing historic levels of rain in affected areas.

But as dawn comes to the Gulf Coast, we’d like to hear from our Florida readers about how they made it through the night.

Please check in!

“The first time in 35 years the water has gone over our seawall,” reported Scientologist Penny Atwell Jones at her Facebook account. “The pool area is totally flooded, the Sandcastle hotel parking lot go my left is flooded, the marina to my right is totally flooded. I’ve never seen this happen before…Clearwater usually escapes any damage by hurricanes, but not this one. We got hit pretty hard.”

The Sandcastle is a Scientology facility, part of the Flag Land Base in Clearwater, where “OT” level auditing takes place, and it’s right on the intracoastal.

The worst damage in Clearwater appears to be at the beach and barrier islands, so Flag may have been spared the worst. But we’ll be interested to hear how Scientology’s locations came through it.

UPDATE: Just heard from Mike, who sent us this message:

“We are fine. Lost power last night and don’t know when it will be back…. Lots of tree branches down but no damage to us.”

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