ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — "That was a paved road!" Jerry Lutinski points in disbelief to the northern part of Old A1A in Summer Haven.
Monday, days after Hurricane Ian whipped Southern St. Johns County, that stretch along the beach is not recognizable as a road.
"It kind of looks like a bomb went off here," Lutinski said. "It’s that bad. I mean look at it! You can’t even tell there was a road here."
Lutinski doesn’t live in Summer Haven but has lived in St. Johns County for 50 years. He remembers just a month ago when the road was passable. Now it's littered with big rocks, debris, and sand.
"You can’t drive here with anything now. It’s total devastation," he said.
So I hoofed it, checking out the homes, by foot, that are no longer accessible by car. The hundred-year old homes are empty. It feels a little like a ghost town, but the homes are still standing.
"There was nice road here. There were parts that were just sand, but it was level," Renee Ryan said. She is seeing her favorite beach for the first time since Ian slapped it.
"It’s like night and day," she shook her head.
Along the walk, a rope, tied from wooden stake to wooden stake created a rope line that used to outline the road, separating yards from the street. Now, it's just a rope line that spreads over rocks and sand. No delineation is obvious. Along the old road, electrical boxes are out of place, and cables are exposed.
In the yard of one of the historic homes, a septic tank is completely exposed. Hurricane Ian yanked out the entire septic tank right out of the ground.
Just mile further south, on another unreachable part of Old A1A, ocean waves breached the dunes in many places during Hurricane Ian. Now, the stilts of beach homes are more exposed. St. Johns County officials say they’re working to find temporary ways to fill in the dune gaps created by Ian. And the study planned for this area's erosion issues will continue.
"Mother Nature’s going to do what it wants," Lutinski said.
Meanwhile, back on that northern stretch of Old A1A, the historic homes survived but the road did not.