In last week’s post, I discussed on our video blog the interviews we had conducted for Planning to Turn the Tide in Sarasota County, Florida, during our mid-June trip through southwestern Florida. Today, we wrap up the Florida trip with a brief video blog about our visit to Fort Myers and Fort Myers Beach, which both suffered the brunt of the impact of Hurricane Ian in September 2022. Despite repeated efforts to identify and contact planning and administrative officials in Fort Myers Beach, we never succeeded, even with the help of some area volunteers. Perhaps if we had more time in our tight schedule, we could have persisted, but my time, at least, was about to expire that weekend before flying back to Chicago on Monday, June 19. The clock ran out for us, but we did tour the city and gather extensive dashcam footage of conditions there. This Category 4 storm substantially damaged more than 1,000 homes in a city of 5,600 people.
City Hall was obliterated by Hurricane Ian, and recent news from the city indicates that the building was slated for demolition starting today. You can see a tour of the damaged City Hall on this local NBC video clip, and you can see the beginning of that process in a Fox news video.
We did, however, conduct an interview that Friday morning, June 16, with Tony Palermo, assistant director of community development for the City of Fort Myers, at that City Hall and learned a great deal about what Fort Myers had experienced. Tony generously followed with a personal tour on foot and by car of the downtown area, again allowing us to gather additional footage of the area. Many downtown businesses suffered flood damage with two to three feet of water, but nowhere near the direct impact of Fort Myers Beach. When we visited, most were back in operation.
Our upcoming video blog posts will take us to destinations in Colorado and Iowa, which videographer David Taylor and I covered during a two-week road trip from July 6-18. Stay tuned.
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Jim Schwab