Many residents of Florida’s Anna Maria Island evacuated ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Idalia, but Alexis DeLeon decided to stay behind and document the storm on TikTok.
Her decision has turned her into a local celebrity, as well as a resource for residents who evacuated.
“I have over 1,000 DMs on different platforms of people sending me their exact addresses and asking me to go to their streets for their businesses to peek in the windows,” DeLeon, 23, said. “I’ve even had people tell me where their spare keys are to pop in and see if there’s any flooding inside.”
Typically, DeLeon makes content about her travels across the country in her van. Now, back in her hometown of Anna Maria Island, she’s become a guerilla reporter covering the hurricane damage for her TikTok followers.
Like many others affected by Idalia’s path through the Gulf of Mexico and into the east, DeLeon has shared the aftermath of the storm with videos of flooded streets, house fires and falling trees that have gone viral on the platform. The hashtag “#HurricaneIdalia” had more than 251 million views by Thursday afternoon.
Four TikTokers who spoke to NBC News said the platform has been a way to get information out quickly, especially for a hyperlocal audience who wants to know how their community fared during the storm. It’s also been a way to show those who don’t regularly experience hurricanes what the damage looks like first-hand.
“I had tons of people who have never been through a hurricane or even understand how the tides work here in Florida,” DeLeon said. “I think it was good content for a lot of people on a lot of different levels there.”
In one video that has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, DeLeon is seen swimming through a flooded street. In another that has also been viewed 1.3 million times, she shows a marina being ravaged by whipping winds.
DeLeon said she knows that swimming in the sea surge is very dangerous and she doesn’t recommend people who are unfamiliar with hurricanes or the region attempt to venture out the way she did.
“I obviously don’t recommend what I did. I don’t recommend staying [behind] if you’re new to Florida. ... I think just never doubt a storm and play it safe. Evacuate if it’s mandatory and don’t risk your life if you’re not comfortable in the area,” she said.
Farther north, in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, Becca Ingle, 34, has also used her TikTok to keep her 345,000 followers, some of whom are locals, updated on the storm damage.
In addition to posting about the community, Ingle shared a video of the flooding in her own home, where she and her husband took measures to waterproof after a storm flooded the same area last year.
Ingle said whenever a natural disaster happens, she looks to TikTok to find the person or people who are sharing the realities on the ground, whether it be the Maui wildfires or an earthquake in California. She said that during Hurricane Idalia she wanted to be that go-to person for Ocean Beach Isle.
“I just feel like if you have something important that people need to know, they’re gonna hear it on TikTok,” she said.
In some flooded areas, like Hudson, Florida, TikTokers shared dramatic video of not just flooding, but also fires.
Hunter Watson, 23, shared a video of himself boating through a street and passing a house engulfed in flames. Watson said the house was damaged by an electrical fire triggered by the flooding. His video has been viewed more than 270,000 times.
“We heard a loud bang, which was the breakers blowing up or something blowing up electricalwise,” Watson said. “And the house lit up in flames.”
One downside to sharing the up-close moments of Idalia’s aftermath on TikTok, Watson said, is the social media know-it-alls.
“They were saying, ‘This is what happens when you don’t do this,’” but there were quite a few people who did extend their concerns though,” he said.
While TikTok can be a window into the storm's aftermath, it just can’t convey that briney, rotten smell of a house that's been flooded with seawater, said Dr. Meghan Martin, a pediatric emergency medicine physician, who lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Martin, 39, who has 1.4 million followers on TikTok, shared her experience with the storm even before it made landfall. From riding out the storm at the hospital where she works to coming home to shoes and cat toys floating on the water filling her living room.
While she shares much of her life on social media, Martin said she felt she had a unique opportunity to share with her followers as Idalia approached.
“I think a lot of people hear about hurricanes on the news, but I don’t know if people really understand truly what it means to, like, prepare for a hurricane, buckle down and hunker down for the hurricane, ride it out, and try to recover from it,” she said. “So I thought it was a good opportunity to kind of open that part of my life for people to see what it’s kind of truly like.”
Martin said she, along with her husband, four children and four cats, will have to move into an 800-square-foot condominium a colleague is renting to her for several months while her home is repaired from the damages left behind by the hurricane. She plans to share that part of her journey, too, she said.
Still, a silver lining is the way Martin’s TikTok community has supported her in the aftermath. After starting a GoFundMe to pay for damages, Martin’s social media community quickly raised more than $30,000. That money will now go to Martin’s neighbors, she said, who also suffered serious damage after their homes flooded.
“This is going to be a lot of work for our community,” she said.
