The parking lot at Arden Villas, which reportedly suffered heavy flooding from Hurricane Ian. (Courtesy of Jeff Blostein)

As I stood in my yard with the hurricane’s tail winds still lashing Orlando, I couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic while looking at the tree Ian had chosen to topple.

I was grateful the storm didn’t do more damage and that everyone in my family was safe. That was most important. Still, I had a soft spot for this tree — a tabebuia that exploded with yellow blooms each year.

This tabebuia tree - a descendant of the Orlando Sentinel's 1961 city beautification effort - was toppled by Hurricane Ian. (Scott Maxwell / Orlando Sentinel)

What made this particular tree special is that it was descended from one of 5,000 tabebuia saplings the Orlando Sentinel distributed back in 1961 as part of a citywide beautification project.

Martin Andersen, the former publisher of the Sentinel — then the Sentinel- Star — offered the trees for $1.50 each to celebrate what was then a major expansion of the Sentinel.

Today, excited expansions of community newspapers are a distant memory.

So, as the dark clouds raced overhead, I found myself thinking about what seemed like sad symbolism. A fallen tree. A smaller paper.

But then I realized that was too simplistic. Because the storm also served as a reminder of the crucial role the newspaper still plays in this community — and how today’s journalists rallied with as much dedication and commitment this week as the ink-stained wretches who cranked out copy decades ago. Fewer in number, but every bit as determined.

They are people like Kevin Spear, our environmental and transportation reporter who has covered natural disasters for more than three decades.

Orlando Sentinel reporter Kevin Spear with another car - not the one he used to jerry-rig power to his laptop this week so he could file stories about Hurricane Ian. (Kevin Spear / Orlando Sentinel)

Kevin has covered storms from his car, from a hotel that had its roof ripped off and once while drinking whisky in a church fellowship hall while popping powerlines set fire to trees just outside.

When Ian took out Kevin’s power Wednesday night, he wasn’t deterred. He connected a 400-watt inverter to the battery of his wife’s car and ran an extension cord to his house to keep his laptop juiced long enough to file a story about when others might expect to get their power back.

While Kevin was fighting with power, the Sentinel’s retail writer, Austin Fuller, was waging war with water that was flooding his apartment.

“Around 4 a.m. I woke up to go to the bathroom and was standing in water,” he said. Austin tried to battle the encroaching floodwaters with a kitchen pot but quickly realized his fight was futile. Yet on Thursday, while Austin was still dealing with a flooded home, he was also turning in dispatches to let readers know when their local grocery stores would re-open.

Here’s the view from my window of the water that has flooded into my Winter Park apartment and covered the entire unit. Water not yet over my boots inside at least! #HurricaneIan. pic.twitter.com/QqfNWhBtj6

Everyone had a role to play. Reporters were sent all over Central Florida and even to Tampa Bay to tell stories about people who’d lost power and possessions even as the reporters didn’t know about their own.

Reporter Skyler Swisher started one day in St. Petersburg and finished it in Kissimmee. When I asked him how he was doing, he practically brushed off the question to tell me about a man he’d met who’d escaped flooding with his two pet birds.

The determination to gather and share stories and facts was a 24-hour churn. In fact, when popping transformers woke me up around 1 am Thursday morning and I sent a note about a column idea to the Sentinel’s managing editor, Roger Simmons, he immediately wrote back. He was still working as well — and kept doing so via flashlight and hot spot even after his own power went out an hour later.

Roger would at least sleep in his own bed. Carolyn Guniss would not. Instead, the Sentinel content editor snuck moments of shuteye atop a comforter she laid on the floor of Seminole County’s emergency operations center. Carolyn had volunteered for the shift, having covered Florida hurricanes since Andrew walloped South Florida in 1992 and knowing how desperate readers are for information in times of crisis.

Carolyn Guniss, Orlando Sentinel staff portrait in Orlando, Fla., Tuesday, July 19, 2022. (Willie J. Allen Jr./Orlando Sentinel) (Willie J. Allen Jr. / Orlando Sentinel)

“I think that service to readers is ingrained in us,” she said.

Carolyn has watched the newspaper business change over the years, seeing newsrooms shrink and the demonization of journalists intensify. The latter strikes her as a sad and skewed way to view the people who spend their days attending zoning meetings, covering high school sports and watchdogging local politicians when they’re not pulling all-nighters at the emergency center.

“We just want to help,” she said. “So we’re plowing ahead with the resources we have.”

I’m proud to work alongside the hardscrabble journalists who chose to remain in this profession after many of our colleagues departed. Disasters provide a clarion reminder of why the work matters.

In fact, after I went back inside my own house Thursday afternoon, thinking about the hard work Sentinel staffers had done — and how Ian had the audacity to topple a tree with more than six decades of Sentinel DNA in its leaves — I fetched my pruning shears and snipped off a couple of branches.

My hope is that, with the help of a little rooting powder, those branches will one day grow another tree with the same DNA from decades ago — and that there will still be local journalists covering communities like ours everywhere in this country decades from now.

Maybe these tabebuia branches will one day help grow another tree. (Scott Maxwell / Orlando Sentinel)