Before Hurricane Ian, Florida’s Southwest Coast Was a Place to Escape the Chaos

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Jessica Cosden’s household was huddled collectively at dwelling as roofs rattled, timber crashed down and surging waters crammed the 400 miles of canals lacing their metropolis.

Then all the things went darkish.

“We simply misplaced energy,” Ms. Cosden stated. “My 3-year-old son is freaking out.”

As Hurricane Ian charged ashore alongside Florida’s southwest coast on Wednesday, it turned a laid-back stretch of suburban shoreline identified for tiki bars, golf-course retirement communities and stone-crab fishing havens right into a strand of destruction and chaos.

With no electrical energy, the Cosden household waited collectively into the night time on Wednesday in a single candlelit room of their home in Cape Coral, a fast-growing metropolis of 205,000 close to Fort Myers. Hannah, 12, felt OK however nervous about her household getting harm. Jacob, 10 and residing by his first actual hurricane, stood in a nook and closed his eyes.

“I’m tremendous shaken up,” Jacob stated. “I simply need this to be over. I’d moderately be in school.”

Cities alongside Florida’s Southwest Coast, pounded by storm surge and 150 mile-per-hour wind gusts from Ian, can really feel like sleepier cousins to the high-rise multicultural pulsations of Miami. The area skews older, whiter and extra conservative than Florida’s denser Atlantic coast. Locations like Cape Coral have lengthy drawn Midwesterners attempting to find an reasonably priced slice of Florida shoreline.

However on Wednesday, a lot of that had been shattered. There have been experiences of roofs ripped off houses in Cape Coral. Within the rich coastal enclave of Naples, a resident stated he had three toes of water in his dwelling.

In Everglades Metropolis, a mecca for stone-crab fishing, some residents who had barely completed rebuilding after the devastation of Hurricane Irma in 2017 had misplaced all the things as soon as extra, stated Holly Dudley, whose household runs a crabbing enterprise. Ms. Dudley stated streets have been flooding, automobiles have been floating and fishermen have been anxious about whether or not their boats had survived.

“I do know God has a plan,” Ms. Dudley stated. “We’re thick-skinned and he makes us resilient. However sooner or later, when will it finish?”

In Cape Coral, Hurricane Ian’s sprawling fury reminded some longtime residents of Hurricane Donna, which pummeled the town in 1960 when it was barely a developer’s dream on a map, marketed as a Waterfront Wonderland the place lots of of miles of canals had been carved into the land.

“There was no one right here,” stated Gloria Raso Tate, a metropolis councilwoman whose household arrived in 1960, proper in the course of Hurricane Donna.

On Wednesday, she had fled her dwelling alongside the swelling Caloosahatchee River, which runs close by, within the hopes of discovering security farther inland at her sister’s home in a distinct neighborhood of Cape Coral. Ms. Raso Tate stated she nervous her home may not survive the storm.

“We’re in the course of it,” she stated.

The hurricane posed a menacing take a look at of whether or not a fast-growing metropolis might deal with one of many worst storms to strike the coast in a long time.

“We’re swamped with individuals,” Ms. Raso Tate stated. “That’s the difficulty proper now. Most of our residents are new and have by no means needed to undergo a hurricane. There’s been some panic.”

Late Wednesday, metropolis officers stated there had been no experiences of accidents or deaths in Cape Coral, however the toll of the storm was nonetheless unclear. Cops, firefighters and medics weren’t responding to 911 calls on Wednesday till the winds eased off.

Some metropolis officers stated they believed that as many as half of the town’s 205,000 residents could have determined to remain of their houses, regardless of necessary evacuation orders for a lot of the town that had been issued on Tuesday. The brunt of the storm was initially anticipated to hit farther north, in Tampa.

Shelters that might maintain 40,000 individuals have been solely about one-tenth full, and a few residents who stayed dwelling had been calling to ask about shelters solely after it was too harmful to enterprise onto the roads, metropolis officers stated.

“I feel lots of people simply hunkered down,” stated Melissa Mickey, a spokeswoman for Cape Coral. “That’s a priority.”

As a storm surge forecast to succeed in 12 toes or extra washed into close by Fort Myers, churning whitecaps in individuals’s entrance yards, residents and metropolis officers in Cape Coral have been nervously watching the degrees of the Caloosahatchee River and 400 miles of freshwater and saltwater canals throughout the town.

The canals threaded by Cape Coral had been dug with no permits and little regard for the setting, metropolis officers stated, however they have been crossing their fingers that the net of waterways usually used for boating and fishing may act as a shock absorber for the storm surge and assist drain a number of the rain and flooding.

Officers in Lee County, which incorporates Fort Myers and Cape Coral, had been opening up low dams to empty waterways forward of the storm.

Actual property values within the Fort Myers space, the place a majority of residents are white, peaked after which crashed within the 2008 recession, however the area has boomed lately.

The world’s Latino residents have been rising in numbers, and large new company arrivals like Hertz and a medical-device producer have revved up an financial system that’s nonetheless powered by tourism and housing.

“Once I was rising up it was all retired individuals,” stated Ms. Cosden, who’s on the Cape Coral Metropolis Council. “The inhabitants has quadrupled since I used to be born. It’s much more households, center and dealing class.”

In Charlotte Harbor, about 30 miles north, Jeannie Croke, 50, had determined to experience out the storm at her dwelling alongside a canal, although it was a choice she made when Hurricane Ian was nonetheless anticipated to strike the Tampa Bay space. A few of her neighbors modified their minds and fled for safer floor because the storm barreled towards them earlier on Wednesday.

“We simply noticed two of them previously hour determine to go away. We could also be one of many few remaining,” Ms. Croke stated. “We’ve tied down the boat and did all the things we might do. Pray for us.”

Jennifer Reed reported from Fort Myers, Fla., Charles Ballaro from Lehigh Acres, Fla., and Jack Healy from Phoenix. Robert Gebeloff contributed reporting from New York.