‘Leaving An Indelible Mark’: Beach Talk Radio helps Fort Myers Beach recover post-Hurricane Ian
Note to readers: The News-Press and Naples Daily News are recognizing the heroes of Hurricane Ian. These are people and organizations who went above and beyond after the Category 4 storm hit Southwest Florida on Sept. 28, 2022. We asked these heroes to tell us in their own words about their experiences. Today, we hear from Ed Ryan, the founder or Beach Talk Radio along with his wife Kim. He shared his story with our reporter Samantha Neely.
These are the emails we get every day. It's crazy and humbling.
"Thank you for all the information you provide." "We live in the UK and have been visiting Fort Myers Beach for 15 years … ." "We have been following you on FB since Ian hit, your broadcasts have helped us through it."
We had 8,000 followers before the store. Today, we're up to 86,000 and most of those people were added around Sept. 28, 2022. We had no idea the response we'd get.
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We do these Saturday morning walk arounds that we've been doing for nine months now. Kim does a bike ride around on Sunday and it's amazing how many people watch those things … every week there's a little bit more progress and they get to see something new.
Maybe a building that was collapsed on itself during the storm that is now gone. Or maybe a street has cleared up and they want you to go down the street because they want to see a house that they rented for 20 years to see how it looks and things like that.
Or they just have memories, they want to see how their little piece of paradise is doing.
We've been here for several years, and none of the hurricanes were really that big of a deal, right? We heard this one was heading toward Tampa so we didn't go anywhere. We stayed here at the house.
I think it was probably just a few days before when we say "Oh, this looks like it's coming right for us."
I did a walk around the day before and it was pretty deserted on the beach. There were a few people sitting at Yucatan before it got really bad, it was a bit of rain. Just trying to have a last drink or have something need beforehand and then they were heading back to their house off the island or not too far off the island. I drove off and I was basically the only car there.
So we just kind of got ready here at the house. And luckily for us, and the people that were following us, we never lost power, so we were able to get as much information as possible. That was part of the issue in the first few days, especially for the people on the beaches. They really couldn't get any information because they had no cell service."
It was just really … it was crazy. We didn't know really what was going on at the time, especially during the beginning. We didn't know if people stayed and died and how bad the debris was on Estero Boulevard until we got down there and walked around.
Those first few days … honestly, it's just a blur. I tell people that all the time. It really is a blur because so much was going on. It's hard to remember those first few days and how chaotic it was.
What did Fort Myers Beach look like after Ian?
We were able to get over the bridge either a day or two after, before they really started to block it off and do the search and rescues, so we got over the bridge and you couldn't recognize Times Square. You couldn't recognize Estero Boulevard.
The streets were completely covered with sand and debris and wood from houses and roofs, so it was hard to get a sense of direction when we first got down there.
To see the people that live on the beach to have to go through losing their house and then having to walk with whatever they have left on their back to their place which is now completely gone — it was surreal. It was like watching a Mad Max movie because of the sand and the dazed look on their face.
The Fire Chief at the time (Ron Martin) told me that if the storm surge is as bad as they're predicting, then the Gulf of Mexico is going to connect with Back Bay. When he told me that, I kind of chuckled because you can't picture that, you can't really wrap your head around that much water … but when that tide came in and then storm surge comes in, you see the pictures of how it did connect.
And he was right.
It was just get information mode for us. There wasn't anything that we had lost physically, so we were just trying to help people get information or we were just trying to help people pick some stuff up and try to help clean up.
What did Beach Talk Radio look like in a post-Ian environment?
One of the first things we did was we raised over $300,000 total and the first $150,000, we gave to the Community Foundation and the Women's Club so they could distributed it however they saw fit.
We also did our show in the rubble at (Fort Myers Beach restaurant) Pete's Time Out. We did a show at the base of the bridge. We obviously we lost our home base because Pete's Time Out was gone.
It's a tight rope to say "Hey, do you mind if I ask you a few questions," and most people, if not all the people that we spoke to down there were very nice and they told us their story. At the time, they had no idea what they were going to do but that was one of the things that we kind of did, a lot of just kind of walking around, talking to people and seeing if we could help them.
We would just find different places to do the show and pass off the checks to them. I think it might have been $5,000 at a time or something like that. Or maybe it was $10,000, just whatever we got, we donated it to (residents and business owners) and all this money was coming in from donations across the country. From people that put their trust in us that we would do the right thing with it.
We never expected the response we got. Tell how much I was surprised by the response, we created this account for the donations on PayPal. I call PayPal … I said "Dude, something's wrong here. I think you're depositing somebody else's money in my account because this is crazy. What's going on here?" He's like, "No, no no, that's all coming in from your donations."
They just were looking for an outlet to help, whether it was with money or whether they could send supplies and a lot of them are still helping to this day.
What's the future of Fort Myers Beach?
It's going to be different. It's going to be build stronger. It's going to take some time but, I'm not an expert, it seems to be going as good as it can go right now … because I don't know where the rulebook is on how fast it should go.
I know there's a little bit of frustration with some people that want it to go faster. I don't know what the process is when you get hit with a near Cat 5 hurricane, how fast it's supposed to be but every weekend, it gets better. Every week and it gets cleaner.
We hear a lot of "We just want it to go back to the way it was," … It's never going to be the same. It's just that the people make up the island, not the buildings, not the skyscrapers or whatever there's going to be built. It's the people.
If folks want to come to Fort Myers Beach and spend some of their money around the businesses down here, they would love it. There's more businesses opening every weekend.
What's next for Beach Talk Radio?
We learned that even if a storm looks like it's going to Tampa to get your a― out of town.
Make sure you have your hurricane pass if you live on on Fort Myers Beach. We learned that if you're going to have to go and get a permit, you should get a good contractor that knows how to fill out all the information so that your permit doesn't keep getting rejected and then sent back in.
We plan to keep doing the show every Saturday with information about Fort Myers Beach, we do it with guests that are politicians, guests that are in the community guests. We're talking about insurance or we're talking about the rebuild or debris removal, things like that but we'll just keep doing the show every Saturday and Monday nights, with the mayor's Monday show with him.
We've done toy drives for the beach kids. We've had three concerts to raise money for different organizations. We've done two 5k races already, which raised $20,000 for FMB Strong. We're planning two more events in addition to our Sept. 28 event before the end of the year, so all that donated money and everything that we organize goes back to the community.
After all of this: Are you a hero?
We hear that but Kim would say the same thing — no, it's not even close. All we were able to do was be a voice or a funnel to get information out. That's it.
We appreciate that people think that but that's crazy. We do appreciate the feedback that we've gotten from people. I beg people to stop thanking us because it just sounds odd. We're really just providing information, a service to people that we know that there's a need for.
So, who is a hero?
Dan Allers, the mayor … I saw him do amazing stuff without any recognition.
Baptist pastor Shawn Critser, still to this day helping people out. He was out there, busting his back, giving things away, trying to find things that people needed.
He's not the fire chief anymore, but Chief Ron Martin, who I know has seen some things that you can never unsee. I know that he was out there during search and rescue with the teams trying to find people that were missing and he would be at the top of the list too.
There were so many volunteers that just drove up to our house helping, I mean hundreds of them. If there was a way for us to have a big party where everybody that helped could come, we'd need a an auditorium. We have had people helping from everywhere and repeatedly, we would get deliveries of Amazon boxes that would cover the front door.
These people are just amazing. Every day they just kept giving, it doesn't get lost on me or Kim that these people have put that kind of trust in you.
This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Beach Talk Radio shines spotlight on Fort Myers Beach after Ian's hit
