Mexico Beach is a city of 1,072 near Panama City in the Florida panhandle.

Hurricane Michael made landfall at Mexico Beach at 2 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 10. It had maximum sustained winds of 155 miles per hour and was just short of being a Category 5 storm.

>> Watch: Live webcams track Hurricane Michael's path as it moves through Florida, Georgia

A Florida man was killed in Mexico Beach when a tree fell on his home during the hurricane. He was the first death of the storm.

One woman who decided to ride out the storm in her Mexico Beach condo told CNN there was "total devastation."

“We didn’t think it was going to be this bad,” she said, estimating rebuilding would take months or years.

>> Hurricane Michael leaves power outages, flooding in its wake as it nears Macon

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Ernie Suggs, a reporter at the AJC since 1997, reviews a selection of articles he has contributed to during his time with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as of Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025. (Miguel Martinez/AJC)

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