We are back in our unit, and the only visible damage the community has is down palm fronds. There was no water surge, no flooding. The people who have lush landscaping, have to clean up everything, but there may be a few houses with some shutters that got blown off. Nothing too major to fix; maybe a gutter or downspout replacement.
We were so friggin lucky with this. The predictions were going to be disastrous for the entire west coast of Florida. I know the beach and other sand communities are devastated yet again, but the more we have these storms, the more the sand is going to wash away in to the ocean.
It's like the news said - Fort Myers Beach was literally the last destination in Southwest Florida that exemplified "Old Florida", to the point that you could look down Estero Blvd and see the 1960s to 1990s where you had okay, some tourist shops in places, but you didn't have the super resorts or big build up. You had just easy living.
Same with Sanibel and Captiva. Those are truly Old Florida - no chain stores, no malls, no big grocery. Not even street lights in some places. Just houses and land. Calm and relaxing.
Now the three areas are being battered year after year with storms. The Earth is eroding away and what is left, mega mansions and resorts are being built on top of it. It's becoming too touristy.
Yet, where this last storm hit the hardest, was in Sarasota and Bradenton. My mother can't get a hold of her cousin in Bradenton. The last couple texts this morning started repeating on themselves, which means one of us lost cell service. It's probably the cousin since we don't know the state of the cell towers there. We have slow service, but we aren't Pete and Repeat in our texts. One of the last things that was written was "we have no power", even though they have a generator. We expected them to be able to last through this. The woman and her husband are nearing 80 and have a little 3 year old dog (I think Chester is 3?). They're healthy people (to a point) but if their generator isn't working, we don't know what's going on. We can't go check on them - the rivers we cross to get there are going to overflow by the weekend. High tides and stuff.
With all the traffic that will come back from the north, if they can come back, it's going to be insane to try to get up there. We don't even know what type of damage they have. Considering the tornados that plowed through this area yesterday morning, local news was talking about all the downed power lines and destruction in Fort Myers. I think my mom saw on Facebook or we heard it on the news, that most of the intersection lights are off.
I just looked at the front page of the local paper. One of the headlines says "3.1M people without power". I didn't look into it. It was a DeSantis article, but I was looking to see if there was anything else for local. Anything that stood out.
I know the area of town I work in will be bad. I don't know how bad though. Too many places got ripped through by the tornados.
We just got such crazy and scary wind all night, that my mother and I didn't sleep. We kept the radio on all night because there was no television upstairs. We were able to maintain power and such, but the internet keeps flickering. Hopefully this is it for the rest of the week, but there's still the prospect of surges happening. Bridges getting washed out because they are already at peak levels over the waters.
This is what happened during Ian. The storm surge brought in all the water from the oceans and could inundate the bridges. It won't be pretty. Or safe. Hopefully the water can go back down and make for safe travels for people. Especially those hard hit and need the crews to get to the broken cities and fix them. It's going to be a while before everyone is back to whatever "normal" is.
I've got to finish putting my stuff away. Like I said, I wanted to create a quick post to say we're okay, we're in our unit. No flooding, no big problems.
I'll update later if I can.
Cheers;
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Thanks for sharing!