Hurricane Ian: The Storm That Rewrote the Coast
Near Fort Myers, Florida
On September twenty-eighth of twenty twenty-two, Hurricane Ian made landfall as a Category Four storm on Cayo Costa Island, then again near Punta Gorda, on the southwest Florida coast. What followed was the costliest hurricane in Florida's history and the third-costliest in the history of the United States.
The storm surge was the story. In Cape Coral and Fort Myers, the water rose six to nine feet above ground level in neighborhoods that had never flooded before. Ian's Category Four winds destroyed rooftops and walls. But it was the surge that trapped people in their attics, that overturned boats and scattered them across canals, that pushed saltwater through doorframes and turned entire subdivisions into inland bays. In Cape Coral, where the canals that were designed for recreation became channels for the surge to travel, the water reached places miles from the shore.
Ninety-eight percent of Cape Coral's power infrastructure was, in the words of a county official, obliterated. In Lee County as a whole, seventy-two people died directly from the storm, the largest single-county death toll from a hurricane in Florida in decades. The overall death count across Florida reached one hundred forty-nine confirmed direct fatalities.
Fort Myers Beach, the barrier island just south of here on Estero Island, was largely destroyed. The fishing pier, the hotels, the restaurants along the pass, the beach cottages that had stood for generations, most of it was gone within hours.
Recovery in southwest Florida was slow and contested. The federal government's response drew congressional scrutiny. The rebuilding continues today. In Cape Coral and Fort Myers, you can still find, if you look, the waterlines on the walls and the empty lots where houses used to be. Ian happened in twenty twenty-two. The coast is still being rebuilt.
