Cedar Key, Florida has always known how to take a hit. 

But between August 2023 and September 2024, this small Gulf Coast island of roughly 700 people absorbed three hurricanes in thirteen months, and a Dock Street fire that tore through the heart of the town's waterfront economy one week before Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4. 

This episode traces the sequence: Idalia, Debby, the fire, Helene. 

It looks at what the storms took from the clam farmers who produce more than ninety percent of Florida's farm-raised shellfish, the business owners rebuilding for the third and fourth time, and the residents who stayed when others left. 

It asks the question Cedar Key is still answering: how many times can a town rebuild before it becomes something else? 

Cedar Key is not a cautionary tale. It is a town mid-sentence. 

This is the first half of that sentence. 

Episode Two drops next. We go inside the recovery, stay in a 150-year-old building two blocks from where a 19th century homesteader is buried, and walk a Dock Street where new businesses are open before the old ones have finished rebuilding.

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