SO found reports of transformers falling on houses and burning them to the ground. Oops.

I guess we're go back if they have lifted the order.

I think it will happen tomorrow.

My brother and SIL live in Sarasota and my mother is in a Memory Care Facility in Tampa, so naturally we've all been on tenterhooks as Ian wafted and waved his way northward.

They put up their hurricane shutters and were about as prepared as they could be (though nothing could have done much to protect them if the eye of the storm hadn't shifted Eastward only shortly before it was to hit them.

They still have no internet or power and even cell service is spotty (sometimes they can call mostly not).

That's the ONE really awful thing about Florida. Every time hurricane season begins, I remember my grandmother's beach house south of Myrtle Beach (right on the shore) being blown and washed to smithereens in a long ago hurricane.

The house to her right was completely spared; the one to her left actually had the ground floor washed away (somehow leaving the second story livable). There was nothing left of Grandma's house, though, but a pipe draining from the ground and a small clock my father had painted decorations on. (Her next house she had built on the second row back from the surf, on the inlet.)

I remember vividly, evacuating before the storm struck, slogging in a long line of cars, tires partly submerged. The sky was a peculiar purplish hue around noon and the inlet we just managed to drive by in time, was bare of water with fiddler crabs scrabbling naked on the sand, scurrying into their holes. Funny things that stick in your mind.

I only heard about this, of course, since it was only my grandmother who drove back to see what had happened during the storm. She cried for a while whenever she talked about it. She was also disturbed (we all were) to hear from her about the trucks which got through for looting.)

Ft. Myers and Naples got the worst of it.

Right.

We have friends on holiday in Orlando for the week.
Timing, LOL

The Sunken Gardens flamingos made it through the storm.
https://www.tampabay.com/hurri...room-are-doing-fine/

I just spent 3 days with SO and his family. It was kind of like a vacation. I feel badly for the places and people affected by Ian. But I can't lie. I'm glad we got nothing more than 35 mph winds here.

90 percent of the homes in Fort Myers Beach have been destroyed.

First hand account.

https://www.news-press.com/sto...cane-ian/8137683001/

Shark swimming in someone's yard.

https://abc7ny.com/hurricane-i...rs-florida/12280667/

Saw an interview with a woman who said her family lost their house in a wildfire in CA in 2018. Her husband always wanted to live on a boat.

Yea, you guessed it. They bought a boat and we’re living on it in Fort Myers.

It’s gone.

quote:

Originally posted by wtg:
Shark swimming in someone's yard.

https://abc7ny.com/hurricane-i...rs-florida/12280667/

!

Add Myrtle Beach, SC to the list.

quote:

‘I Did All I Could’: As Floodwaters Rose, She Fought to Save Her Disabled Brothers

Darcy Bishop for decades has cared for her two brothers, who have cerebral palsy. Hurricane Ian was her biggest test yet.

tl;dr - They all made it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/1...rescue-brothers.html

quote:

Saw an interview with a woman who said her family lost their house in a wildfire in CA in 2018. Her husband always wanted to live on a boat.

Yea, you guessed it. They bought a boat and we’re living on it in Fort Myers.

It’s gone.

I am not interested in blaming this couple, but at the same time, it's hard to be sympathetic for their situation, which was created but them by choice. It's one thing for people who have lived in a place their whole lives, don't have the choice to get elsewhere etc... But to go from area impacted by natural (ish) disasters to another which is basically famous for getting battered by hurricanes... It doesn't strike me as a wise decision...

quote:

tl;dr - They all made it.

I would not have read this article w/o your tl;dr, even knowing the ending, it still made me cry. What an ordeal. And what a life, a lifetime of caring and self-sacrifice.

And that flood company!!

quote:

The flood insurance company informed her that recouping her losses requires taking a photo of each ruined item and writing down its description. It is an unimaginable undertaking.