Consider This from NPR - Hurricane Ian Tears Across Florida

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Hurricane Ian carved a path of destruction through central Florida, with extreme winds, heavy rains and a torrent of waters flooding in from the Gulf of Mexico.Roads and bridges were washed away, coastal cities were swamped and electrical systems were wrecked - leaving millions of homes and businesses without power. While the full scope of the disaster is not yet known, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says it will take years to rebuild.We'll hear an eyewitness account of the destruction in Ft. Myers and check in with NPR's Greg Allen in Sarasota, where many neighborhoods are flooded.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. When Hurricane Ian struck Florida's Gulf Coast on Wednesday, WGCU reporter Sandra Victorova was hunkering down at the Emergency Operations Center in Punta Gorda. The eye blew over. And, you know, just as it was approaching, even here, I mean, this is practically a bomb shelter. And you could feel the vibration, especially up against the door. And, you know, this building is, of course, got to be one of the safest in the state of Florida.

So it was very intense. Chelsea Rivera was feeling that intensity in Sarasota, 50 miles away from the eye of the storm. Actually, I'm looking out my window right now. I see palm trees swaying back and forth. The scariest part is probably the wind that's going 150 miles an hour. It's shaking the house. Rain is pelting, you know, the windows. Rivera is a graduate student at the University of South Florida.

And when early forecasts showed Hurricane Ian on course to hit where she was, she took shelter at her parents' home in Sarasota. She says they were among the lucky ones. Their power stayed on even as most of their neighbors went dark. And then I heard that all the houses on the coast are submerged in water, which is, you know, devastating. It makes me sad, you know, just thinking about the restaurants, you know, the homes on the waterfront, you know, places that I love, you know, destroyed by the storm. So it's going to be a really, really hard week. Hurricane Ian is one of the strongest storms ever to make landfall in the U.S.

When it came ashore on Florida's Gulf Coast, it was a massive Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour. In addition to that wind, Ian brought heavy rains and a torrent of waters flooding in from the Gulf of Mexico, swamping coastal cities. We started seeing water pretty early as the tides began to come in and the surge began to grow. Naples City Manager Jay Boudishwar describing the scene in his city just south of where Ian made landfall. Water effectively breached the community from both the gulf side and the bay side. And there are points in Naples where the gulf did meet the bay. Roofs ripped from their houses. And 911 operators have received a steady stream of calls from residents trapped in their homes by high water.

Jamie Carson is communications director for the city of Sarasota. She says rescuers have been able to reach some, but not all, of the people who've called for help. But there's a certain point that's about a third of our county that we are considering the red zone. We're having difficulty reaching to individuals that are in need. We're working with our municipalities down there, but it's definitely a catastrophic situation. And Carson says the danger isn't over yet. We are in the process of sending out emergency notifications regarding imminent flooding for our community. So while Hurricane Ian has passed, the dangers continue.

President Biden has declared a major disaster in Florida, opening up more aid and assistance to the state. The needs will be massive. The storm has knocked out at least two bridges, including a large section of the Sanibel Causeway, which links Sanibel and Captiva Islands to Fort Myers. And it did heavy damage to the power infrastructure in central Florida, leaving at least 2.6 million homes and businesses without power. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the impact and the damage by the storm historic. You're looking at a storm that's changed the character of a significant part of our state. And this is going to require not just emergency response now in the days or weeks ahead. I mean, this is going to require years of effort to be able to rebuild and to come back. Consider this. We don't yet know the full impact of Hurricane Ian, but the destruction in Florida is massive and the recovery will be long and costly. Coming up, we'll go to Fort Myers, one of the city's hardest hit by the storm.

From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Thursday, September 29th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. 18-year-old Bobby Pratt lived in Fort Myers his entire life until he went away to Orlando for college. Once Hurricane Ian canceled classes, he decided to go back home to ride out the storm with his parents. They have electricity and water, though they're under a boil water notice. Their fence was destroyed. Their front porch ripped off. But the rest of their house made it through without substantial damage.

My colleague, Juana Summers, spoke with them about what it was like when Ian hit. So as it was hitting our area, the winds started off as not too strong as this one was south of us. But as it began to hit us, winds were ramping up. Debris started flying through the streets. We could hear roofing tiles from our roof flying off. And we could see trees outside bent over almost 90 degrees. We had, the wind was crazy. I mean, it was just, it was destroying things around me.

Like trees were being destroyed. I saw a roof come off of a neighbor's house during the storm. Yeah, it was just crazy. And we don't have shutters or anything up on our windows, so we were just praying that none of the debris was going to hit our house and break any of our windows or damage our house severely. Now, I understand that Fort Myers is under a curfew, but before you received that order, you were out filming for social media. What have you seen? Just damage.

That's the only way carnage is what I can describe it as. I was just in shock. As I was in the downtown area of Fort Myers, I saw boats in the streets, docks had floated up on the streets. Big concrete docks had flown into the downtown area on the streets, docks had floated up on the streets, big concrete docks had flown into the downtown area on the streets. And as I went to the beach, as I drove over the bridge, I could see that our fishing pier that had stormed, it was completely gone. I could just see that it was going to be bad, worse than I could have ever thought it was. And as I walked down the bridge, because I had to park my car on the bridge, I couldn't drive it any further. I walked down,

I just saw that there was nothing. It was just rubble from the shops and the restaurants destroyed by the storm surge. Growing up in Fort Myers, you must have some places that are really special to you. Were you able to check in on any of those this morning? Yeah, like I said, I went to the beach. And the beach is the place that me and my friends, we definitely spent a lot of our time there. I mean, our weekends, most of all of our weekends were spent there, you know, in the water, walking around, eating. A lot of restaurants that we used to frequent are completely gone. I mean, there's a Dairy Queen that we used to stop by every time we were at the beach that is one of the buildings that's just completely gone. Honestly, I don't think it'll ever be the same.

It's just those places have been there a long time. On the beach, my dad went to those when he was young, and his dad went to the places when he was younger, when he was a teenager. Those places have been there a long time. They really made Fort Myers what it was. And now that they're gone, I don't think it'll ever be the same. So, Bobby, what are the next steps for you and your community as you seek to recover from the storm?

As of right now, we're clearing the streets of debris from the storm so we can safely travel and so emergency responders can get to people that need help. As for rebuilding the lost buildings and restaurants and stuff, it's going to take years for that to be rebuilt. 18-year-old Bobby Pratt in Fort Myers, 70 miles or so north in Sarasota, is where we find NPR's Greg Allen. He spent the day visiting communities trying to start to recover from the storm. He told my colleague Elsa Chang where he went, what he saw. Well, you know, there's little power and cell service in the affected area, so I had to drive quite a ways north just to get a signal out. But one place we visited was Northport, a town in Charlotte County where there was a lot of canals. Water rushed in there

yesterday, residents said, when the storm surge happened, and many neighborhoods were flooded. We stopped outside one development, Country Club Ridge, which still had six feet of standing water in some places. Residents were using canoes and kayaks to paddle to and from their homes, ferrying out people, pets, and possessions. Many people were clearly stressed here. Others were just trying to make the best of it. Yeah. Well, were rescue crews present to help? Well, while we were there, this was all being done by residents and volunteers. You know, people were wondering where some of the help was coming from. Later in the day,

we did see some local officials bringing school buses to take people who were being rescued from their homes, taking them to shelters. We talked at one point to Elvis Salte and her neighbor, Heather Rosler, about what they went through yesterday. Everything's flooded, trees down, fence down, arbor down. Everything's destroyed, everything, every home in there. Windows broken. Windows broken, roofs off. It's really a very difficult time for many here. There's just so much work to be done now. We also visited another community in Charlotte County, Englewood. Almost every building that we saw was damaged in some way. Michael Daly, a resident there, says the problem was that for several hours it was just the wind

was relentless. It was insane. The wind was as strong as anything I've ever seen. When we saw the cage starting to go, we started slicing the screen so it wouldn't pull the whole side of the house off. If you look around, some of the guys that didn't, their soffits and everything got torn down. It was really a tough scene there in Inglewood. I can hear it in the voices. I know that many of these communities there were battered for like hours and hours by this hurricane. Which areas saw the most damage? Well, you know, as you noted, we're still getting the assessment in, but it's clear that one of the hardest hit areas was Fort Myers Beach, which was just totally devastated. You know, we had that storm surge there for hours, and plus the high winds. The pier there, this well-known pier, was destroyed.

Only the pylons are left standing. Some important bridges were also taken out. The causeway to Sanibel Island was washed out in many places. And that's a place I think many people know. It's this beautiful island that's a big resort, a place where people come from around the country. The causeway is now unusable, meaning that it's totally cut off now from the mainland. Today, Governor DeSantis, Florida's governor, talked about it. Well, Sanibel is destruction.

For those of you who haven't been, it's beautiful. It's a beautiful place, really neat community, and it got hit with really biblical storm surge. The governor said the state will work with locals there to make sure that Sanibel gets back the way it was before the storm. And I think that's going to be, that's been his tone all along, is that he says we will make a commitment, working with the federal government, to rebuild southwest Florida, you know, so that we can recover from this. And PR's Greg Allen reporting. No state in the eastern U.S. has grown faster in recent years than Florida. There are three million more people living there now than there were in 2010. And that means more

people in harm's way when destructive hurricanes like Ian strike. Juana Summers spoke to NPR's Becky Sullivan about what this fast-growing population means for the state. You know, people come to Florida for all kinds of reasons. It's warm year-round. There are beaches. Housing there is relatively cheap. A big one is there's no individual income tax, which is great if you're retired.

And then for retired people and immigrants especially, there are a lot of big communities of people there like them. So all of this means that even as overall U.S. population growth has slowed to a crawl Florida is still growing something like 600 Americans move to Florida every day according to the Census Bureau which is way more than any other state and so across the country since 2010 only two other big metro areas have grown faster than Orlando Jacksonville and Tampa are near the top of that list, too. And then smaller cities like Fort Myers and Cape Coral have also grown a ton. And, you know, some of those cities, Fort Myers, Tampa, of course, here on the west

coast of Florida, bearing the brunt of Hurricane Ian right now. And Becky, more people means that more folks are likely to feel the impact of a natural disaster, right? Yeah, exactly. It's more likely than ever that a hurricane will strike a major population center in Florida because there's so many more of them and because they're bigger. I talked to a researcher about this. His name is Stephen Strader, a professor at Villanova who studies how humans are vulnerable to natural disasters. He called Florida's population boom an example of the, quote, expanding bullseye effect. Basically,

he said, imagine an archer drawing a bow, taking aim at a target. If the target is really small, it's hard to hit. But if it gets bigger and bigger, it gets easier and easier to strike. The difference is, is instead of an arrow, we have hazard events like hurricanes and tornadoes. And then instead of having targets, we are the targets.

Our cities are developed areas and nowhere is that most readily seen is along our coastline. Another way of looking at it is billion dollar storms used to be very rare. Now there are 10 or more every year. The most costly storm ever was Katrina in 2005, followed by Harvey in 2017. And depending on how Ian plays out over these next few days, it could be up there. And PR's Becky Sullivan. Depending on how Ian plays out over these next few days, it could be up there. NPR's Becky Sullivan. It's Consider This.

From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.