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We’re down here for the winter.
Ft. Myers beach is still a total disaster zone. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING destroyed, save for a few recent builds with updated building code specs. Homes, trees and vegetation are brown. Debris still everywhere in the mangroves. The power of water and surge. A 10 year fix, but a ton of out of state disaster contractors are working hard every day to haul out debris..
The bottom pic was a trailer park near the beach washed out. Note the trailers washed back into the palm trees.

Bonita Beach homes first floor homes down to the studs, as well as everything along the water from Marco to Sanibel.
Repair schedule obviously tied to wealth. The more you pay, the quicker you’re fixed.
Port Royal and similar areas are looking pretty good now.
Go in a mile or two from the beach/surge areas, and you would never know a hurricane happened. We’re a mile and a half from the beach, and no issues remotely pointing to what happened here.

Real estate prices? Still going up! Even homes listed with first floors shown in studs and hanging electric, they are selling as fast as listed.
Junk 1,600 sq Ft homes 1/2 mile from the water that were selling in the mid 400s are now going for over a million.
Storms be damned, the world wants to be in SW Florida for the winter.

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Enjoy the sunshine T. Glad to hear your place survived. What a mess. That last pic is surreal.

The wind from a hurricane isn’t the killer, it’s the storm surge. I never fully understood that. Looking from afar in safe NYS, I always thought is was as simple as wind tearing things up. 10’ of water being pushed by that 150 MPH wind? Yikes.
A mile away from this surge devastated area looks totally untouched and 100%.

The dream was to move up and buy something with ocean access on a canal or inland waterway where we could have a boat down here and sit on a lanai at night admiring the beauty of water with lights across the bay.
Of course skyrocketing prices have made that dream totally impossible now, but what an eye opener this storm was..
There is no way I would ever chance living near sea level, and definitely no way I would want to endure a rebuild. I can’t imagine what some people are having to deal with. We’re currently sitting at 18’ above sea level, and the water from the imperial river was in sight and creeping up.
Of course, tons of unaffected generational wealth here with multiple homes to use during a rebuild, but so many blue collar people with nothing left, living in tents and travel trailers.

And another sad fact is that American taxpayers will continue to bear the brunt of the increasingly wasteful cycle of flooding, damage, and repair.

AsLan7 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 8:22 pm And another sad fact is that American taxpayers will continue to bear the brunt of the increasingly wasteful cycle of flooding, damage, and repair.

$160B was spent rebuilding New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, a city where more than half the population lives below sea level, lol. That works out to $424,000 per resident. As a comparison, about $40,000 was spent per resident from hurricane Sandy damages.

The good news is the Ian surge is very unlikely to be repeated anytime soon, most climatologists put the unusually large surge it at a once every 200 year event. In Naples we are 100 yards from the Gulf of Mexico and only 16’ above sea level at high tide. We had zero damage other than losing some bikes and two cars as our garage is only about 4’ above sea level. Our neighbors below us are only 6’ above sea level and had 2” in the lower elevation section of their condo. Their costs to redo the the floors, Sheetrock, cabinets, is about $80k and how much is covered by insurance and FEMA is still uncertain but it’s likely that at least half the costs will be out of their pocket.

Unlike Sanibel and Ft. Myers beach, things are mostly back to normal here and in another 6-8 months it will be hard to tell that we had worst storm surge in at least 100 years swept through here.

I’m guessing you live in a tower condo that is not on the first floor Bum? You are very safe. Those living at ground level better keep a FEMA policy in full force.
IMO, what ever climatologists predict, they are obviously using past data as a reference.. We are entering into a new era of Antarctic ice melting warm weather on planet Earth.
I’ve been in the area since 2016, and there have been two direct hits. Irma/Ian.
Both times were severe. Irma was worse with wind and rain driven flood damage, Ian with Surge. For us, I’d take another Ian over Irma. Everything around us, except a few (counting us) were flooded out.
There are pictures of Irma in Port Royal.

I can’t remember if this was Galleon or Spyglass.
What a mess.
Banyons everywhere toppled