Oh God, poor Fort Myers Beach. My poor, poor Fort Myers Beach.
One more place I care about in ruins – this is getting too much for me to process.
There were houses here. I know them well. This little island is a paradise, and look what happened.
Ian
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Clarissa's Blog 
“poor Fort Myers Beach”
Very sad. But as someone who grew up in the general area (and commuted to S Fort Myers for the better part of a year) I have a different attitude…
Hurricanes are going to happen and so you do what you can to mitigate their impact and be ready to rebuild when they do their worst… Despite what HGTV says, there’s a reason not to build housing on a beach in Florida and that’s it…
I will say it is very weird to hear about places I know well on a Polish news channel…
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Yes, but it’s so beautiful. So beautiful!! How can anybody avoid building there?
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“How can anybody avoid building there?”
The question is not so much whether to build there (given economic realities) but what to build there.
A permanent house full of a lifetime of acquired things and memories — very bad idea.
Tourist facilities that are insured to the hilt and can be rebuilt — more feasible.
It’s still sad when the latter are lost (I can think of several favorite hotels whose destruction I’d be very sad to hear about) but it’s preferable to the first…
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Been looking at the helicopter footage. 😦 It looks a bit like Mexico Beach after Michael, but it had more houses to start with. It’s easy to look at that and see a few empty foundations, and a bunch of still-standing “intact” roofs in between, but that’s an illusion. A lot of those will have to be bulldozed– the same storm surge that washed away the other houses washed through all the rest. The multistory concrete structures will have had the first floor (maybe second) washed out, but will likely be repairable. It’ll take a really long time, though. It’s not like when you just buy a piece of land and want to build a house. Or when your roof gets old and it’s time to replace it– because it’s everybody, all at once, available contractors will be rare as hens’ teeth. A lot of people will have to move out of the area, because the rebuild/repair takes so long. Years.
I know where they can get a bunch of used RVs though…
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