- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS.

Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Coming up right now on WEDU, Hurricane Ian turns out to be the deadliest storm to hit Florida in modern times.

We'll talk with reporters who were on scene in the hardest hit areas and discuss why the storm was so big, the environmental impact, and the debate over how to rebuild, all coming up next on "Florida This Week."

(upbeat music) Welcome back.

More than a week after Hurricane Ian smashed into southwest Florida with nearly 150 mile an hour winds in a giant storm surge, power is still not on for many people in the area around ground zero, and the area will never be the same.

With the death toll mounting by the day, thousands of homes and businesses destroyed and parts of bridges and roads washed away, those who survived are beginning the long process of recovery.

It's being called the deadliest hurricane to hit Florida since 1935.

President Biden and Governor DeSantis temporarily set aside their political differences on Wednesday to visit some of the most affected areas, and to thank and praise each other for the cooperation between the federal government and the state of Florida in the aftermath of Ian.

The devastation tour through Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel Island, Port Charlotte, Pine Island, Cape Coral, Estero, Naples, Punta Gorda, Marco Island, and Fort Myers itself.

50 miles inland, the town of Arcadia was not only hit by the hurricane, but later, much of it flooded as the Peace River overflowed, submerging nearby farms and ranches in what one local official called, a 500-year event.

And joining us now are two reporters who were on the scene, Colleen Wright as a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, covering the hurricane in Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte, Venice, and North Port.

And Linda Robertson is a reporter for the Miami Herald, who was on the ground in Fort Myers Beach and the surrounding areas, and thank you both for joining us.

Colleen, first of all, let me ask you, what did you see when you got there?

- I went to an area, like you said, Southwest Florida, but north of the direct hit where Hurricane Charley in 2004 was top of mind for a lot of residents.

They might have not lost their entire home, but they did suffer a lot of damage.

I saw a lot of power lines being dragged down by trees and by debris at.

In Port Charlotte, I saw the Tampa Bay Rays Spring Training Complex where metal roofing was wrapped around trees and there was damage, water damage inside and outside of the complex in the ballpark.

I saw a lot of residents who were really tired of being without power for so long because their loved ones had medical needs or they had little ones at home and we're just looking for a hot meal.

But the storm affected them just as much as it has in the past, although I think everyone is grateful that they weren't as hit as bad as the neighbors down south.

A lot of people I talked to we're very grateful and said, "Hey, anything we can do to help out our neighbors down south, we wanna focus on that."

- Linda, you were at ground zero a little bit further south.

What did you see when you went there?

- A parking garage in Fort Myers near downtown when the storm hit and the, just the effects of the storm that were so apparent from that vantage point with the wind and the rain, but we didn't get the storm surge there.

And then the next day, we were in Fort Myers Beach, which is a town of about 5,600 year round residence.

It's a barrier island.

It's on Estero Island.

And the devastation there was surreal because you had this 10, 12-foot storm surge that came in and basically destroyed the first floor of any structure or flooded it.

And a lot of the smaller, older homes were completely ripped off their foundations and carried by the waters 50, 100, 300 yards like they would, you'd find one house a block away from where it had originally stood, and you'd see just houses.

We talked to a minister who showed us what remained of his house.

It was literally a pile of sticks, a block.

So Fort Myers Beach was a scene of, I mean, it was, it reminded me of Hurricane Andrew, the destruction of Hurricane Andrew in 1992 in South Dade, except that they had this storm surge and just tons and tons of raging water plowing through there for a couple of hours.

- So when these houses are moved, it made it much harder to recover, at least to find out whether or not people survived or what or to recover the bodies because the houses were moved, maps no longer made any sense in the area.

- Correct.

I mean, what these search and rescue teams were doing was they were taking the grid and trying to methodically go from home to home and look for survivors, people who need help.

And also, if there were any bodies to be found.

But the problem, one of their main problems was, there's no grid left on a, there were no front doors to knock on.

And so they had to sort of identify homes sometimes by what the neighbors described of what used to be the home.

And then they might have to walk a couple 100 yards to find the actual house and see if there was a body inside there, and we were with a crew that found a body in the rubble of a house, pretty much destroyed.

And in fact, I just heard from this daughter-in-law of the gentleman who died.

She's in Colorado, and they were able to find the house on Google Earth by identifying the car, and then she saw the Miami Herald story and she put two and two together that her father-in-law had perished in that house.

- There was a claim by some locals, and Colleen, I wanna start with you on this one, that they didn't have enough warning from their local government that, and I wanna play the animation from the National Hurricane Information Center.

This is the projected track of Ian going back about six days before it hit.

Fort Myers, the area around Fort Myers was always in the cone or just on the edge.

Did local folks say to you that they had enough warning from local government, Colleen?

- Around Port Charlotte, Punta Gorda area, I think a lot of folks I spoke to didn't think that they would get a direct hit, and I think there was also this feeling of, "Well, we went through, like I said, Hurricane Charley in 2004, we're gonna stick it out."

I think evacuation is pretty complicated for a lot of people.

It's not as cut and dry as some think it is.

but I don't think, I can't encounter people who were seriously thinking of evacuating just because I think that they had, kind of their plans.

I talked to one couple where this man recently found out two weeks before the hurricane that he was paralyzed.

He had cancer from one day to the next.

He lost the use of his legs and he wanted to die at home.

He did not want to be cleaned up in front of strangers at the shelter.

He stayed in his house, his 1909 Craftsman house during Hurricane Charley, and he was gonna stay through Hurricane Ian, and they were very grateful that they lived.

But no, not a lot of people that I spoke to mentioned evacuation orders, but we were, of course, north of the direct hit.

- And Linda, how about you?

Did people feel that they were adequately warned?

- I would say there was maybe 50-50 on people who complained that they didn't get enough notice, although Lee County issued evacuation orders on Tuesday, I think Tuesday morning.

So that was more than 24 hours before the storm hit.

And some people felt that wasn't, even 24 hours was not enough time, and the county didn't follow its protocols that it should have.

Then there were the percentage of people who basically said, "It's my fault I didn't evacuate.

I stuck it out because," there's a variety of reasons, as Colleen said.

I mean, some people just can't evacuate.

They're medically compromised.

They're elderly.

And then there's people who underestimate the surge because they had been through Charley, they had heard a lot of false alarms and what I call like crying wolf syndrome with Irma, where people evacuated for Irma and then really, nothing much happened there.

So they, you know, human nature is to sort of like figure that you're gonna be okay.

You can ride it out because you've made it through these other storms.

- What was your sense of the people that you talked to?

Were they determined to rebuild their houses on the site where their houses were destroyed?

Or were they about to move out of Florida?

And Colleen, let's start with you.

- Definitely encountered a lot of people who were very exasperated with what's going on, but they were committed to staying put, repairing any damage that they had, helping their neighbors.

I encountered like a strong sense of community, and we're gonna stay here, we're gonna rebuild, we're gonna stick together and it's gonna be okay.

Of course, they didn't have the total loss of their entire home being gone because of the hurricane.

But definitely, a sense of community, a sense of resilience, and that they're gonna band together and make it through, and a lot of people call Florida home and might continue to call Florida home.

However, there are some people who move to Florida during the pandemic, and this is our first time going through such a storm, such a natural disaster, so it'll be interesting to see if those folks stay, stick around or if they head back.

- And Linda, what did you find out about the people that you talked to?

Did they wanna rebuild?

- I would say, I mean, this was early days and people were just kind of overwhelmed, but the most of people, their first response was, "Yes, I'm gonna rebuild.

I'm gonna stay."

I even talked to a few people in a trailer park that was just completely knocked down and they said, "This is my home.

We have a community here.

We take care of each other and I have nowhere else to go, so I'm gonna pick up the pieces here."

And it was interesting to hear from people who were, had recently moved to Florida, they also seemed committed to staying.

So I think people, it's like, it's hard to start over again in a new place and relocate, but I did hear some sense that people do dread the future of hurricane season because the science shows that they're only gonna get worse, they're gonna get wetter, they're gonna get bigger, more intense, just like Ian proved.

Charley was small and quick and Ian was huge and lingering and just an incredible amount of water and storm surge.

So I think people are a little bit wary of like, maybe the future of hurricane season is gonna be a different animal.

- Yeah.

It seems like Florida's changed forever.

Well, Colleen Wright and Linda Robertson, thanks a lot.

Thanks for coming on the program.

- [Colleen and Linda] Thank you, Rob.

(upbeat music) - The devastation comes by Hurricane Ian raises a lot of questions about why the storm became so big so quickly, the difficulty in evacuating, and the aging population, the impact on the environment, and how to approach rebuilding.

And joining me to talk about these issues, Craig Pittman, is an environmental writer and author for the Florida Phoenix.

Lindsay Peterson is an assistant professor with the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

And Dr. Jennifer Shafer is the Co-Executive Director of the Science and Environment Council of Southwest Florida.

Nice to see all of you.

Thank you for doing the program.

Jennifer, let me start with you.

Why was this storm so big, much bigger than Charley, an eye diameter of 35 to 40 miles?

Why was the storm so giant?

- Well, Rob, you can boil it down to simple physics if you want.

Of course, it's much more complicated, but basically, more heat equals more energy equals higher wind speeds.

More heat also means more water vapor and more rain.

So scientists estimate that for every degree Fahrenheit increase in sea surface temperature, you can get about 15 to 20 miles per hour more in wind speed.

And for rain, for about every degree Fahrenheit increase in air temperature, the atmosphere can hold 4% more water vapor.

So all that comes back down.

Now, in terms of storm surge, of course, that's a function of wind and storm speed as well, but we've got storm surge stacked on top of sea level rise about eight inches since 1950.

And with our very small tidal range in the Tampa and Sarasota Bay area, it's only about 2, 3 feet stacking eight inches on top of that plus storm surge can be catastrophic.

- And the gulf temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they typically are for this time of year.

- Yes.

And we can also talk about the rapid intensification of the storm as it crossed the gulf from Cuba, very shallow, very warm water.

One thing we think we know is that while these storms are expected to intensify with climate change, the frequency of storms may not.

And there's some complex oceanographic and atmospheric reasons for that, but we can certainly expect more intensity.

- Lindsay, the average age of the victims was 71, half the victims were very elderly, over 71.

Most of those were dead by drowning.

There was a hard time, I mean, there was a hard time evacuating elderly people from the path of this storm.

- Yes.

One of the things that has been changing consistently over the years is that older adults have been able to stay home.

They call it aging in place.

People don't like to go into nursing homes.

And in response to that, the government has made it easier.

They've funded services at home, they've funded services at home for people even as they get increasingly disabled.

So we have a lot more people at home now who have a nursing home level of care.

The difference is if they're in a nursing home, the nursing home is required to protect them.

They have to produce disaster preparedness plans every year that are monitored by the federal government and the state.

For people who are at home, there's nothing.

They don't have anybody checking on them to make sure that they have a plan and a way to carry out that plan.

- So there's no government entity checking on people that live alone, maybe have no caregiver, no close by relative, and maybe who are tied to that home because they get their oxygen from a machine.

- Yeah.

They may have, very likely they have home health, they have meals on wheels, they have something, but none of those agencies are specifically responsible for disaster preparedness for their clients.

There are some rules in Medicare that for home health for instance, they should talk to them about whether they have a plan, but they're not responsible for helping them make that plan, helping make sure that they can carry out that plan, nothing like the protections that are in place for people in nursing homes.

- That seems like a really big gap.

- It's a very big gap.

Yeah.

- Craig, the environmental issues are really big.

Gasoline was spilled, chemicals were spilled.

We see that disinfectant is leaking from a county-operated water utility line, and the sewage spills are happening all over, and they're happening in Bradenton, they're happening in Polk County, they're happening all over because of this hurricane, and this is an environmental disaster on top of being in a hurricane disaster.

- Right, and further consequences will follow, especially because of the sewage spills.

We're gonna see a lot more toxic allergy blooms as a result of that.

So any sort of progress that's been made on cleaning up our waterways, out the window, I think is.

- So when gasoline spills or these toxic chemicals spill, because nobody's there to person the facility.

- Oh, because it's run by electricity and the power goes out.

- [Rob] Right.

- Yeah.

- [Rob] How do you clean it up?

- Very slowly, basically.

And some of it, it's just lost.

And so everybody kind of crosses their fingers and says, "Dilution is the solution to pollution and maybe there was so much water, it won't have consequences."

But it always has consequences.

- The other issue that comes up with flooding being major problem, not wind damage, most of the damage in destruction is caused by flooding.

- [Craig] Right.

- Less than one in five of the state's 10 million homes has flood insurance according to the Insurance Information Institute.

And without insurance, people in flooded areas must appeal to FEMA for money, and that's kind of capped out.

Some people get 30 or 35,000.

If they're really lucky, they get 70,000, most people get a lot less.

- Yeah.

And I mean, so that's us taxpayers helping to pay for people living where they probably shouldn't, but developers got to build there.

Local governments were okay with it, and then suddenly, the water comes through.

So yeah, a lot more people ought to have flood insurance than do, and part of the problem is that a lot of these properties repeatedly flood.

They flood over and over and over again, and there's no requirement under state law that the new home buyers are told, "Hey, your property flooded before."

- There's no requirement that be disclosed?

- No, no.

There's no requirement whatsoever.

There was a proposal in the legislature to fix that in 2020, and the bill just went nowhere and died in committee.

And I talked to the sponsor, Annette Taddeo, and I talked to the committee chairman, Doug Broxson, and Broxson was like, "Well, and I think the marketplace will take care of that.

The home inspectors will catch that."

So I called a home inspector who'd been doing it for 15 years.

He said, "No, we'll never catch that.

We are only required to do a visual inspection.

If there's been some prior disaster, we won't see that."

- Jennifer, let me go back to you.

So this raises a question.

How to rebuild?

I mean, should we be rebuilding exactly in the same footprints that we're at?

Should we further harden the shoreline or should we retreat from the coastline?

What's the best way to prevent this kind of massive disaster from happening again as we approach rebuilding?

- Well, I think we should take a page out of the nature's playbook.

Nature is very resilient.

It can slough off a big storm with very little loss.

And it's the nature of shorelines and barrier islands to move.

So when we anchor them in place and harden them, they are not resilient.

When you look at the aerial photography that NOAA just produced before and after the storm.

You can see that where there are on our barrier islands and bay fronts where there large coastal setbacks and healthy dune systems, those areas didn't appear to be much impacted.

In fact, the beach kind of grew on the southern part of the storm area, but where you saw the shorelines were constrained by jetties, by sea walls, by houses, that's where things got destroyed.

So I think we need to really start building for resilience, and that can mean really enhancing the natural services of our ecosystems.

So building healthy wetlands to absorb water, naturalizing our shorelines so they can take the brunt of the impact.

And of course, keeping our water as clean as possible.

All of these will help us clean up faster.

And I think that if you build for resilience, the time to think about that is not right after a storm necessarily.

It needs to be built into our planning process.

Every county has a post-disaster redevelopment plan.

They have a local mitigation strategy, a comp plan.

So these are the kind of questions that communities should start working on now to be prepared for the next event.

- And Craig, there were two communities that went through the storm rather well, Babcock Ranch, that's a few miles east of Punta Gorda, and then Punta Gorda itself went through the storm pretty well.

Why?

- Well, Punta Gorda, in particular, because it was devastated by a prior hurricane, Hurricane Charley back in 2004, the year we had four hurricanes slam into the state in what, about two months.

And so they came back in and when they rebuilt, they built stronger, up to their building code protections and made sure that they could withstand a much stronger hurricane.

And I think Babcock Ranch was more prepared as well.

And part of their advantage was they, it's an all solar community.

And they been few reports of solar panels being ripped up by the storm.

- Jennifer's idea though, of letting Mother Nature take over and recreating a natural shoreline.

Is that an idea that many cities or counties are developing?

- No.

I mean, there's been some talk about what's called living coastlines, where you bring back, try to bring back the mangroves that people foolishly cut down and recreate oyster reefs and things like that, but that's not cut on.

There's still a much greater pressure to build houses where they'll be washed away and just sort of recreate the same mistakes we've made before.

- And Lindsay, I gotta ask you about evacuation.

I mean, it seems like what we've learned is that there's gotta be some more comprehensive effort to help people get out of low lying communities, especially elderly people that may not have relatives nearby.

So how do we do that?

How do we have a more effective and comprehensive evacuation plan?

- We need to communicate so much better to individuals but also to communities.

We have a special needs register in the state that older adults, people, anybody with a disability can get on this register, but you've got to do it well ahead of time.

A lot of people don't know it exists.

A lot of people don't think of themselves as being disabled, even though they are.

So I think there's, we could communicate with people a lot better about why they should do this to make the messages geared not so much toward if you are disabled, but we need to know about you if you think you're gonna need help in a hurricane, but there's a lot of barriers.

So there's the state registry, and then if you actually want a space in a special needs shelter, you need to register again with the county.

So it's just a matter of providing the right information to people about who they need to contact, and making shelters, places where people feel they can go.

For our research, we did interviews with caregivers of people with dementia and one of the things that we heard from almost everyone was, "I would never go to a shelter.

I would never take the person I care for to a shelter because they would probably panic and probably wind up worse off."

Of course, they couldn't have imagined what Ian was gonna bring, but people at shelters, sometimes they're trained, but these are very difficult environments, very crowded.

They're very difficult for people with disabilities.

So we could do a whole lot more work toward creating safe spaces where people can go, letting them know where they are and how to get there, and why they really need to do it.

We might be able to do this after Ian.

- Lindsay, thanks a lot.

Craig, thank you.

Jennifer, thank you.

A lot to think about as we approach the rebuilding process here and it's great to have you on the program.

- Thank you.

- Well, we wanna remind you that Floridians who wanna vote in the upcoming primary election must register by next Tuesday, October 11th.

Election day is November 8th with early voting, varying by location.

You can register online at registertovoteflorida.gov, and you can view this and past shows online at wedu.org on the PBS app.

"Florida This Week" is now available as a podcast.

And from all of us at WEDU, stay safe, help your neighbors, and have a great weekend.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] "Florida This Week" is a production of WEDU who is solely responsible for its content.