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MANATEE COUNTY, Fla. — Jennifer Moore owns her beach shop, Sun and Surf, that has been in her family since 1983.
“So I grew up here. I was 11, and I was in the store after school. I would come in and do little projects,” she said.
And now that’s the same hope for her kids.
But at one point, it was hard to imagine if this place would still be here.
Hurricane Helene flooded her business with roughly four feet of water, damaging nearly everything inside.
Moore says she knew it was going to be tough to recover from all that was lost in the storm.
But with hard work and dedication, repairs were made, and she just reopened her store last month.
“We were closed for eight months. It was extremely difficult. But we powered through it and we got through it at the end, and we conquered it,” she said. “It made us stronger in all, and hopefully better. It was like this upgrade we all got at once.”
She says neighboring stores in the Island Shopping Center started opening up more recently, which prompted her to organize a grand reopening celebration for all stores in the plaza to take place Friday, June 6 from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m..
She wants to highlight the businesses’ resiliency to bounce back after the storms and let shoppers know they’re open for business.
“This is like a second home, this plaza. I come here every day. And this is just a feeling of home where I grew up. And now my children are growing up. And how all these different businesses and the community — how we’ve all come together,” she said.
Moore is ready for this next step, coming out of rebuilding and bringing the community together once again.
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Julia Hazel
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