FORT MYERS, Florida—Gage Long was never worried about the winds of Hurricane Ian, even as they reached 155 mph just miles from his apartment on the Fort Myers waterfront. His building was solid concrete and he felt safe, he told The Daily Beast Thursday, adding that many of his neighbors said the same.
Fearful of post-storm looting, Long said nearly everybody at the Riverwalk Apartment Homes complex elected to ride Ian out. But it was a decision many would soon regret, as the asphalt that separated the two-story complex became inundated with eight feet of storm surge—and, by the early afternoon, two yachts had washed up between its walls.
“We’re in Florida, we’re naturally not scared of hurricanes,” Long said. “But nobody expected this. Every time I came to check on the water, it just kept coming… Then I go to look at the water level again and there’s a massive boat just floating at eye level with me.”
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The yachts—both at least 40 feet long and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—crashed into the complex in the early afternoon, just as Ian made landfall 20 miles to the west at Cayo Costa Island.
Hurricane Ian flattened buildings in Fort Myers Beach.
Joe Raedle/GettyFrom the barrier islands of Sanibel and Estero to Fort Myers on the mainland, Lee County suffered much of the worst damage as Ian made landfall as a catastrophic Category 4 hurricane.
Casualty estimates have varied drastically: Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno initially said he feared there would be “hundreds” dead among the “thousands of people that are waiting to be rescued.” But Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday it was too early to say with certainty how many people died.
Volunteer search-and-rescue groups in Fort Myers said they boated past bodies while helping stranded residents, many of whom were elderly.
“We definitely saw bodies in the water. You could smell it,” Mike Foster, who is from Virginia and working with the nonprofit Crowdsource Rescue, told The Daily Beast. “But that’s the second stage of the operation. Right now we’re still focused on getting people out.”
After canvassing an area with thousands of homes, Foster said a lot of people did not evacuate and were calling for help as his crew sped by. Rescues have been intensive and especially difficult due to the “magnitude” of the damage from the combination of storm surge, strong winds, and flooding, he said.
“This is a once-in-a-century type of storm,” he said. “The devastation is unreal.”
While the storm surge raged, Long remembers seeing a man swim from the complex’s parking lot to the yacht outside his window. He then climbed in it as if he were a pirate. With the surge not yet to the second floor yet, Long poked his head out to see what was going on.
“Then all I heard was a man yell, ‘get off my damn boat,’ and the crazy guy who swam there didn’t listen,” Long said. “He just did his thing, but the boat wasn’t moving.”
The surge washed away Wednesday evening, Long said, but the tide didn’t carry the boats back with it. Instead, the massive vessels were abandoned in the complex along with a wave of destruction around them. Long said one boat’s owner came by Thursday morning and “was pissed,” but he said he understood.
“I’d be mad if that were my boat, too,” he joked.
Long, a 29-year-old bartender, said he fared well in the storm, but that’s because he was on the second floor. His biggest inconvenience—besides having a massive boat blocking off the stairs to his apartment—was a brief power outage and having no running water.
Directly below his unit, however, Brenda Long (no relation to Gage) said that as the water climbed Wednesday, she quickly became trapped inside her apartment.
Long sprang into action, jumping into the storm surge and fetching Brenda from her kitchen counter, where the water was quickly rising. He carried her outside and lifted her into his apartment before the water could overtake her, and just before the yachts came crashing in. Brenda was uninjured, Long said, and her family picked her up Thursday morning.
“It’s those people on the first floor who felt this the worst,” he said. “The beach area got things the roughest, but I doubt it could be much worse than what those poor people went through yesterday.”
Heraldo Ramirez, 39, lived on the complex’s ground floor. He said in Spanish on Thursday that “everything was gone” and that he did not have time to speak more, as he hauled drenched furniture outside.
Others at the complex were equally distraught, as their belongings were strung across the ground. A mother and daughter swept out standing water with brooms, while another man sat with his head down on a water-soaked couch in the middle of the parking lot.
The mood at the complex permeated everywhere in Southwest Florida. Downed trees, power lines and traffic lights made movement near-impossible on residential streets. People stood with hands above their head as they surveyed the damage—roofs ripped off, storefronts left to rubble, and gas stations crushed by falling trees.
At the few businesses open Thursday—like a Circle K and Waffle House just outside downtown Fort Myers—families filed in lines out the door for the opportunity to buy anything, while hundreds of other businesses sat in darkness.
With Ian officially past Florida and into the Atlantic Ocean, the state is turning into recovery mode. In the state’s southwest corner, that will mean restoring power to over 500,000 customers, Gov. Ron DeSantis said, and restoring access to barrier islands—like Sanibel Island, which was completely cut off from the mainland after experiencing “biblical” amounts of storm surge.
Interstate-75, which connects the four counties—Lee, Collier, Sarasota, and Manatee—that make up Southwest Florida, was filled with first responders filing south on Thursday, including a convoy of over 100 ambulances that drove in from as far away as Arkansas and Mississippi.
“From the wee hours of the morning there have been people that have descended on southwest Florida to be able to offer assistance,” DeSantis said. “This is going to be a 24/7 operation because we realize how important it is.”
