Dudley said streets were flooding, cars were floating and fishermen were anxious about whether their boats had survived. In Everglades City, a mecca for stone-crab fishing, some residents who had barely finished rebuilding after the devastation of Hurricane Irma in 2017 had lost everything once more, said Holly Dudley, whose family runs a crabbing business. In the wealthy coastal enclave of Naples, a resident said he had three feet of water in his home. There were reports of roofs ripped off homes in Cape Coral. Marco Bello/Reutersīut on Wednesday, much of that had been shattered. Officials in Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Cape Coral, had been opening up low dams to drain waterways ahead of the storm. Places like Cape Coral have long drawn Midwesterners hunting for an affordable slice of Florida shoreline.įallen trees and debris in Fort Myers. The region skews older, whiter and more conservative than Florida’s denser Atlantic coast. I’d rather be at school.”Ĭities along Florida’s Southwest Coast, pounded by storm surge and 150 mile-per-hour wind gusts from Ian, can feel like sleepier cousins to the high-rise multicultural pulsations of Miami. Jacob, 10 and living through his first real hurricane, stood in a corner and closed his eyes.

Hannah, 12, felt OK but worried about her family getting hurt. With no electricity, the Cosden family waited together into the night on Wednesday in a single candlelit room in their house in Cape Coral, a fast-growing city of 205,000 near Fort Myers. “My 3-year-old son is freaking out.”Īs Hurricane Ian charged ashore along Florida’s southwest coast on Wednesday, it turned a laid-back stretch of suburban shoreline known for tiki bars, golf-course retirement communities and stone-crab fishing havens into a strand of destruction and chaos.

Who said power to the people