Just days after Hurricane Ian made landfall, a throng of residents gathered under a towering banyan tree in a motel’s garden bar for drinks and live music.
Less than 10 miles (16 kilometers) away, rescuers were finishing their search for victims on an island off the coast. Closer still, entire families were trying to spend a quiet night in a huge shelter that housed more than 500 storm victims.
On a coastline where a few miles meant the difference between life and death, relief and ruin, the contrasting scenes less than two weeks after the storm’s devastating passage are stunning, highlighting how disaster can mean so many different things for different people.
Arlan Fuller has seen the disparities while working in the hurricane-affected area serving underserved communities with Project Hope, a nonprofit organization that provides supportive medical services. Some factors seem to have played a role in the huge differences from place to place, he stressed: People and places closer to the coast suffered the most, as did people with lower incomes.
“There’s an interesting combination of location, the strength of the structure that people lived in, and financial means,” Fuller said.
On Pine Island, where the state quickly installed a temporary bridge to replace one destroyed by the hurricane, volunteers are delivering water, ice, food and supplies. The Publix supermarket reopened more quickly than seemed possible, relying on power from a generator, which pleased Charlotte Smith, a resident who did not leave her home.
“My house is fine. The ground floor was somewhat flooded. But I am dry. There is running water again. Things are really going pretty well,” she noted.
Life is very different for Shanika Caldwell, 40, who took her nine children to a huge shelter inside the Hertz Arena, where a minor league hockey team plays, after another shelter located at a high school public closed to be able to resume their classes. The family lived in a motel before the storm, but had to evacuate because the hurricane ripped the roof off the place.
“If they say classes are going to resume next week, how am I supposed to get my children to and from school from here?” he asked.
As three shrimpers watched an NFL game Sunday on a television set in the shadow of a boat washed ashore by the storm, Alexa Alvarez wiped tears from the debris in Fort Myers Beach. She has fond memories of her childhood travels accompanied by her brother and her parents, who lived on the island and lost her house as a result of the storm.
“I had to see it for myself, and have a kind of send-off,” she said.
Ian, a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 155 mph (249 km/h), was blamed for more than 100 deaths, the vast majority of them in southwest Florida. It was the third deadliest storm to hit US territory so far this century, only behind Katrina, which caused some 1,400 deaths, and Hurricane Sandy, whose death toll was 233 people despite weakening to a tropical storm moments before arriving. to Earth.
For some, the recovery has been fairly quick. Along U.S. Highway 41, some barbershops, car washes, chain restaurants, a shooting range, and vape shops — lots of vape shops — have reopened. Many of the traffic lights are already working, but low-lying residents and mobile homes are still shoveling mud left behind by the floods.
In Punta Gorda, near the boutiques and places where investment firms do business, Judy Jones, 74, is trying to provide enough supplies for the more than 40 residents of Bread of Life Mission Inc., her homeless shelter. which she has operated for more than five decades.
“I take care of people who fall through the crack in the system,” he declared. “There are people who were on their feet and now they are on their knees because of the hurricane.”
Cheryl Wiese isn’t homeless: For 16 years, she’s spent the fall and winter months in her modest trailer on Oyster Bay Lane in Fort Myers Beach before returning to her home in Ohio for the summer. But what she found after making the 24-hour road trip south in the wake of Ian’s passing practically ruined her.
“I don’t even want to live here anymore. Fort Myers Beach no longer exists. My neighbors and friends are no longer here,” she lamented.
The worst, he noted, might have been driving through the devastation to the public library to start the process of applying for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). A worker told her to be ready for a phone call and a visit from a FEMA representative, and not to miss either.
“If I miss the phone call? Bad luck,” she stated. “If I lose him (the visiting agent)? Bad luck”.