Our biggest fear of moving to Southwest Florida was the fact that you knew that at some point you would have to deal with a hurricane. While living in the northeastern part of the U.S., we were exposed to several small hurricane over the years, but nothing like what we could expect living in Florida.
Well, we got a taste of what this could be like in our second autumn down here. Hurricane Ian turned out to be a major hurricane, it was a category 4 bordering on a category 5. It developed innocently enough in the Gulf of Mexico, but blew up because of the warmer than normal water temperatures. Initially, it was supposed to track by us, and hit somewhere in the Tampa area, but ON September 28, 2022, it decided to track inland sooner and hit the Fort Myers Beach area head-on. This put us in North Port at the northern edge of the eye wall and we were hit with 100-plus mile an hour winds for hours and ended up with about 21 inches of rain.
Before we moved to Florida, Sandy and I agreed that we would ride out a category 1, 2, or 3 hurricane, but if it would be higher than this, we would evacuate if possible. My son Tim and Sandy’s sisters told us that the track was changing, and that we should get away. Sandy found a hotel room in West Palm Beach, Florida on the east coast and we made a split-second decision to leave. I had installed the hurricane shutters on the house, and we moved everything in from outside and took off. Evacuating turned out to not be a problem as we hit virtually no traffic, but we did encounter some rain squalls and heavy winds from Ian’s outer rain bands before getting to West Palm Beach. Our friends and neighbors decided to stay and ride out the storm and thankfully, everyone as ok. They would text us with updates on the condition of the neighborhood and our house, and when text messages would go through, Brian provided them with information on the hurricane’s progress after they lost power. Below was the original projected track and strength of the hurricane before it turned inland as a high Cat 4 farther south than expected. The jury is still out on whether Ian was actually a Cat 5.
This is a radar image of the hurricane from my laptop in West Palm Beach that I sent to my neighbors in North Port during the hurricane:
We live on a canal, and our neighbors were afraid that their homes were going to be flooded as the waters rose to crazy levels outside, luckily the storm moved away in time and our houses were spared the flooding. Some of our other neighbors on our street were not so fortunate. Our house was built on high enough ground that the waters did not make it inside. The only severe damage that we sustained from the hurricane was that we lost our pool cage:
When the flooding in New Port receded enough that we were able to get back home, we were happy to find that our roof and windows were fine. We were amazed that the house survived as well as it did. The neighborhood was a mixed bag for sure, some weathered it fine, where others were devastated.
It took many months over the course of the Fall and Winter for things to get back to “normal”. People are a tough breed here, everyone helped one another and now you barely know that anything happened here. A special shout-out to the local and out of state emergency crews, including the North Port police, fire, and municipal workers did a fantastic job of helping out with the chaos left behind by Ian. Below is one of the double-trucks that came around the neighborhood for months to clean up piles of debris left at curbside by residents.
