Could it take a decade to recover from Ian? SWFL finds hurricane recovery is a marathon

One year down, how many more to go?

Estimates on when hard-hit places in Southwest Florida will fully recover from Hurricane Ian run the gamut.

Community leaders guessed: Maybe a few years in Sanibel Island and Captiva? Several years in Fort Myers Beach, Pine Island and Matlacha? Possibly even a decade?

On Sept. 28, 2022, at 3:05 p.m., Hurricane Ian made landfall near Cayo Costa as a Category 4 with winds of 150 miles per hour. But its deadliest hazard was storm surge, which peaked at 15 feet in Fort Myers Beach. Most of the surge deaths – 36 of 41 – came in Lee County.

Ian caused more than $112 billion in damage, making it the costliest hurricane in Florida history. But with tragedy, came unity. Adrenaline surged; optimism flowed. We were #swflstrong. The worst was over.

Or so we thought.

Since Ian, there have been flashes of normalcy — the Fort Myers Beach shrimp boats back out fishing, Pine Island hosting its annual ode to mangos, Sanibel Island reopening beloved beaches — but the places pummeled by Ian and the people in those places still have years of recovery work ahead.

The sea is our frenemy

Peggy Zachritz escaped the storm surge rushing into her south Fort Myers home by climbing through a kitchen window and grasping an innertube lassoed to her porch. A month after Ian she said: “Dealing with FEMA and insurance is worse than the hurricane.”

Julie and Rick Freniere found frustration at many turns as they began the recovery process and found the federal, state and local governmental responses to be lacking. Their Naples home flooded with 42 inches of water. They felt like they didn’t have a choice but to demolish it and rebuild up to 10 feet. With their new home stuck in permitting, they anticipate it will take another year or more to be built.

“All of these things are out of control, and we’ve lived our lives controlling our lives,” said Julie Freniere, a retired teacher. “We did what we were supposed to do, but your destiny just feels like you’re floating somewhere.”

How fast a place recovers is a maddening equation of ever-changing variables unique to individuals and communities. On a single street in coastal Lee County – where Ian caused the most destruction – one home may be freshly painted and landscaped, another might look like the apocalypse hit yesterday, the third may be an empty lot.

The pace of recovery is uneven. Some hurricane victims may take a year just to decide to sell or rebuild.

“The rebuild is complicated psychologically,” said Claire B. Rubin, who has more than four decades of emergency management experience and runs the blog Recovery Diva.

“It will vary a lot depending on how patient and how rich they are.”

Other factors include the owner's age, which is a big one considering the demographics of Southwest Florida. In Lee and Collier counties, about a third of the population is 65 and older. People come to Florida to retire by the sea, Rubin noted. Then “you find out the sea is your enemy, and you probably don’t want to spend big bucks because you aren’t earning more.”

Also, can they afford the risk of rebuilding given the increased vulnerability of the coasts due to climate change? Do they want to take that risk? Do they have the audacity to reinvest in a dream of living by the sea after witnessing its capacity for annihilation?

Yes, many still do.

Hurricane Ian recovery could take a decade ... Really !?!

More than 4,000 people surveyed as part of Lee County recovery efforts said they intended to fix or reconstruct damaged homes. Only about 300 wished to sell or relocate.

But the past year has proven long-term hurricane recovery is like the muck Ian left behind. (For proof, see “Rick on the Roof,” who camped out on his Fort Myers Beach roof for days in protest of red tape.)

Yet, in the span of hurricane recovery, one year is not much time. “The unmet needs, they’re not clear for 12 to 18 months after the storm,” said Jack Harris, an assistant teaching professor at Rutgers. “For folks after Ian, they haven’t even started the long-term recovery.”

Harris studied recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy and found that up to a third of the residents in places along the New Jersey coastline and bays struck by the 2012 storm had not fully recovered five years later.

"A really big issue with long-term recovery is that the money actually peters out over time.”

The bad news: researchers have found rebuilding after a devastating hurricane may take up to ten years or more.The better news: communities with homeowners with good insurance often start to rebound within a year.

“If the community has a lot of owner-occupied homes that are insured well, you’ll get the bulk of the population back within a year,” said Michelle Meyer, director of the Texas A&M University’s Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center. “If it’s rental properties, if it’s investment properties, they lag in every disaster.”

Haunting images: 'Day of' Hurricane Ian photos include Fort Myers Beach pier still standing

Rebuilding often takes longer for the underinsured, the uninsured, the undocumented, or low-income homeowners. If other help does not arrive, they may be waiting more than a year for Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery funding to materialize.

"It’s slow for good reason," Meyer said. "People need to spend out insurance first, they need to spend out the FEMA money first, and then the community needs to make an action plan."

According to Lee County's action plan, some of the primary objectives are to "create and preserve safe, resilient, and affordable housing opportunities" and to assist property owners to recover as the storm left more than 130,000 people in need of housing assistance after destroying so much of the county's "already strained housing stock."

Lee submitted its action plan for the $1.1 billion in federal CDBG disaster recovery funding this month. Programs are expected to start in 2024.

A timeline for normalcy would be reassuring but not even FEMA could offer an estimate for Southwest Florida.

“There is no really set process that fits to everybody, because it's going to be unique on multiple factors: the severity of the impact, how the community is organized, and also if the community is ready to do the recovery,” said Leda Khoury, FEMA’s federal disaster recovery coordinator for areas impacted by Ian.

Since Ian hit, the federal agency has approved more than a half-billion in individual assistance for 110,000-plus households in Lee and Collier counties. The National Flood Insurance Program has paid out nearly $3 billion in Lee and more than $800 million in Collier. FEMA guides communities through the long-term recovery process.

“We, FEMA, are here for the time that is needed, but really it’s the community that is going to be here for those 5, 10, 15, 20 years that it will take to see what they want to see.”

‘A tale of two cities’

So national experts can’t give us a timeline for a full recovery. What do leaders in Southwest Florida think?

“From the scale of the whole storm, I bet we’re halfway back,” said Lee County Property Appraiser Matt Caldwell, but that includes the easier repairs like fixing a roof or lanai. “We’re really now into the phase of entire whole guts and entire rebuilds."

About 15,000 properties were uninhabitable or seriously damaged by Hurricane Ian. Aerial views of Lee County reflect a “a tale of two cities,” said Caldwell. The islands are still suffering. “Some of these properties I would not be surprised if it was two, three or even four years before they get to a place where they’re truly livable.”

Other homes may never be replaced. Caldwell noted that, 31 years after Hurricane Andrew, there are still lingering signs of the Category 5 storm in Homestead, south of Miami.

Recovering: Four years after Hurricane Michael, Mexico Beach out of survival mode but only 40% rebuilt

And there are plenty of empty lots in Mexico Beach, the coastal Panhandle town that Hurricane Michael decimated in 2018. As of fall 2022, a Mexico Beach city administrator said the city was only about halfway rebuilt.

“Hurricanes leave a mark permanently,” said Caldwell.

The quest for normalcy

If normal is the same, then no, there will be never normalcy again in these Ian-scarred places.

Many people already realize that. With or without hurricanes, change is a constant in Southwest Florida.

But if normal means a mended and thriving community that can better survive another hurricane, “normal” is a goal for people in the trenches of hurricane recovery — even if they can’t answer how long it will take to get there.

A group deep in that work is the Greater Pine Island Alliance. Formed shortly after Ian, they provide recovery coordination and disaster case management and are shoring up island preparedness. About 90% of homes and buildings in the Pine Island area suffered Ian-related damage.

The island is still in “triage mode,” said alliance executive director Erin Lollar-Lambert, but “we are committed to being here for as long as the island needs us and beyond.”

It's hard to know what that future will look like, but at least one thing is certain: “the island wants the island back. The island does not want to be flattened and reimagined,” she said. “It will never be the same. But our new normal is what we’re working to make better every day.”

On Sanibel Island, there are glimmers of normalcy, like when a church hosts an event or a business reopens, said Maria Espinoza, the executive director of the nonprofit F.I.S.H. of SANCAP, which is also providing long-term hurricane recovery help.

“Those normal moments are quite fleeting. The best thing we can do is to know it will be a long haul,” she said, noting there are too many uncertainties to give a timeline for recovery.

Though most people and organizations assume Sanibel and Captiva residents have the financial means to rebuild, “that’s simply not true,” Espinoza said. People are still figuring out where to get the money.

The recovery of Fort Myers Beach is moving slower than residents would like. Ian destroyed community hubs, like the pier, along with an estimated 900 structures. It damaged more than 2,000.

“I think that’s been the toughest thing for all of us, just realizing it’s a marathon and things go at a glacial pace,” said Scott Safford, a founder of the nonprofit Let’s Go FMB, which seeks to accelerate rebuilding.

“Quite a number of people have left and aren’t coming back,” he said, noting that, on his street, “We’re the only family living in our home.” For people to return, there needs to be more normalcy. Safford said: “We need the pier. We need infrastructure. We need businesses back.”

There are isolated signs of rebirth.

Drone video: Flying over Sanibel Island one year after Hurricane Ian provides dramatic views

Earlier this month, Fort Myers Beach community development director Steve Poposki witnessed the groundbreaking for a new home to replace one levelled by Ian. He smiled as looked out at the prepped lot where a storm-ready elevated home is expected to rise within 10 months.

“This is one of the first ones. I think the insurance companies took a little while to get the paperwork and the contractors are all busy,” Poposki said. “We’re going to see a lot more of this — finally.”

He noted about 50 applications for new construction after Ian. But the finish line is far off based on Mexico Beach’s recovery, he said. With that benchmark, five years from now, Fort Myers Beach may be halfway done.

'Help everybody along'

With residents of hard-hit areas anticipating that they'll be immersed in hurricane recovery for years, how can the rest of us help? Community leaders plead: Please visit.

Yes, Ian’s imprint is still evident. There are some lingering debris piles and many hollowed-out homes and empty stores. But there is fishing to be had and cold beer to drink on Pine Island and Matlacha. Daytrips to Sanibel and Captiva can contain the same pre-Ian ingredients: bird watching, clean beaches and ice cream. The gulf views and breezes on Fort Myers Beach compliment the food truck fare along Estero Boulevard and tropical artwork in Times Square, which is not quite bustling but far from dead.

“You’ve got to make the best of it and just help everybody along,” Safford said. “I want it to be a place where when you come visit, in the back of your mind, you say, ‘I’d love to live here.’”

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This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Hurricane Ian recovery is a marathon. One year down. A decade to go?