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Fort Myers Beach (United States) (AFP) – Pete Belinda and his wife walk slowly along the side of a road outside Fort Myers Beach, in southwest Florida. They are tired and each drag a large suitcase. “This is all we have left,” he says, moved. The devastation there is total.
His town, a quiet place on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, became the epicenter of the destruction caused by Hurricane Ian on September 28.
The couple lived on the ground floor of their daughter’s house, where they had moved six months ago, but the storm left them homeless.
“It’s all upside down, wet, muddy,” says 52-year-old Pete Belinda. “We don’t really know what to do right now. We’re calling some friends and family to see where we can live for a while.”
Fort Myers Beach is after Ian’s passage an almost deserted town, traveled only by the vehicles of the emergency services and a few people who return home to check everything they lost. The part of the town most impacted by Ian, the one by the sea, on Estero Island, is a ruined field.
The police prevent access to anyone who is not an inhabitant of that neighborhood, but a helicopter flight allows us to verify the magnitude of the damage. The winds of the category 4 hurricane destroyed the many wooden houses in the area and in some places there is not even debris to be seen, only empty lots where there was once a house.
Rich Gibboni is one of the residents who lost his home. “The second floor collapsed because of the wind, and the first floor was flooded up to the roof,” he explains, resigned.
This 50-year-old man has gone to another neighborhood in Fort Myers Beach, located on the small island of San Carlos, to look for supplies. And now he returns to Estero Island, where he found refuge in a hotel with about twenty other people.
“We have never experienced anything like this”
Nearby, Chris Bills, a 72-year-old woman, sinks her hat on her head as she waits with her husband for a bus to pick her up. This afternoon an emergency services patrol gave them two hours to collect her belongings and leave the apartment they had rented for a few days near the sea.
The couple traveled from England to here to enjoy the good weather and ignored the hurricane forecasts.
“I didn’t think it would be so strong,” he admits. “She was very scared. We had never experienced anything like this.”
In the neighborhood they leave behind, the force of the hurricane left dozens of boats stranded in the streets – some of them still tied to a piece of dock – and dragged cars into the water of a nearby bay where they now float.
Gibboni remains hopeful despite the damage caused by Ian. “Mood is high. We have to survive and this is the only way to do it,” he says. “We have to start over. It’s going to take a long time, so we have to get our strength back.”
