The Blue House: One Family’s Road from Disaster to Recovery

The blue house stands out.

It’s the first thing you notice pulling up to Alanda Walker’s place in Tampa — a vibrant blue, the color of a cloudless Florida sky. When SBP asked Alanda to pick a paint color for the exterior of her newly repaired home, she didn’t hesitate. As a little girl, she’d imagined her future home as a blue brick house. This one is wood, but it’s hers and it’s blue, and that matters more than she can easily explain.

“When everything is going bad,” she says, “I could go look at it and say, ‘I picked that color.’ And I see it every time I go outside.”

After two hurricanes in the span of a few weeks in late 2024, after months of broken pipes, no AC, and sleeping and working from home in 90-degree heat, Alanda saw hope in the color blue.

She had made it from the storm to the other side.

Helene and Milton: ‘I was at my wit’s end’

Before October 2024, life was steady. Alanda — a former home health nurse who now works from home as a patient enrollment specialist — had found a comfortable rhythm as a single, working mom. Her house, a wood-frame home over a hundred years old, had outlasted plenty of storms.

Then, within weeks of each other, Hurricanes Helene and Milton made landfall in Florida.

Helene came first. It was bad — a week without power, some damage — but for the Walkers, it was still manageable. “You could tell we had a hurricane,” Alanda says, “but the recovery for me wasn’t that bad.” 

Then Milton hit.

A fence panel tore loose and drove itself under the house, shearing through the pipes. Both bathrooms went out of commission. The floor of one buckled open — a gap wide enough to see daylight through. Power was gone for two weeks, which meant no work, no income, and no air conditioning. Alanda and her kids slept in 90-degree heat. The power eventually came back, but the AC didn’t. It would stay broken for more than a year, until SBP replaced the unit.

The insurance payout, when it came, barely covered the cost of repairing all the damage. And because Alanda works from home, there was no separating the disaster from her livelihood — the same roof that needed fixing was the one she worked under.

“It was one thing on top of another,” she says. “I was at my wits’ end.”

How a Phone Call She Almost Ignored Changed Everything

Weeks after the storms passed, Alanda had stopped answering her phone. She’d already been scammed once, so when unfamiliar numbers came through, she let it ring.

One day, she didn’t. She doesn’t know why she answered the call this time, just some gut feeling that nudged her to do it.

The call was from an outreach worker at Endeavors, a disaster case management provider, who reached out to Alanda about disaster recovery services. The worker was very clear: the services were going to be provided at no cost. Alanda was skeptical. She’d already had too many people take advantage of her situation. But something made her stay on the line.

“I can’t get no worse than what I already was,” she says.

Endeavors connected Alanda with SBP. Having helped more than 6,700 disaster-impacted families for 20 years, SBP established operations in Tampa in 2024 specifically to support long-term recovery in the communities hit by Helene and Milton.

SBP’s team came out to assess the house. Alanda walked them through everything: leaking roof, water-damaged ceiling, the broken pipes, the floor with the hole, and her son’s bedroom door hanging off its hinges. She expected SBP to tackle the worst of it and stop there.

Instead, SBP repaired everything on her list.

New windows and front door. A new AC unit. The bathroom floor sealed. The bedroom door rehung. Even a new fence. “Y’all gonna do that too?” she kept asking. SBP kept saying yes.

Alanda had spent weeks pricing repairs she couldn’t afford, watching YouTube tutorials on plumbing, buying pipe fittings and coveralls so she and her boys could crawl under the house themselves. She never had to. Every day SBP showed up and worked, the gap between where she was and where she needed to be got smaller.

Fortified and Resilient: Built for the Next Storm

SBP didn’t just restore what the storms had taken. The new roof was installed to the FORTIFIED Roof Standard, which is designed to keep the roof attached during high winds — the point where storm damage most often begins. A secure roof means less water intrusion, less interior destruction, and a stronger foundation for recovery when the next storm comes.

For Alanda, that means her home is now more resilient than it was before Helene and Milton made landfall. The 100-year-old structure has been given a better shot at the next hundred years.

Ask Alanda what resilience means to her and she doesn’t talk about strength or toughness. She talks about “possibility.”

“It means that it’s possible for things to get better,” she says, “even when you don’t see hope.”

She spent months not seeing it. She was ready to make her teenage sons crawl under the house to fix the broken pipes themselves because she thought there was no other way. And then, unexpectedly, she got that phone call that showed her there was another way.

She tells people now: Don’t give up.

“Recovery looked like it was far away,” she says. “But help came. And I made it to the other side.”

This project was funded in part by the Walmart Foundation, Center for Disaster Philanthropy, UPS Foundation, and the American Red Cross.