Ian's floodwaters spell uncertainties, hardship for Florida families

By Tom Tracy - Florida Catholic

Photography: TOM TRACY | FC

FORT MYERS | Normally an art teacher at a nearby community center, Elizabeth Reyes was surrounded by piles of her own art collection and family memorabilia, including her wedding-cake topper. 

The clothing, personal items, wall art and musical instruments were stacked and hung out to dry outside a noticeably moldy house. A nearby statue of St. Francis of Assisi somehow still stood in the front yard following Hurricane Ian’s march across the area Sept. 28, 2022.

The location is suburban Fort Myers, near what is now considered the epicenter of Hurricane Ian’s destruction. That same day, Oct. 5, both President Joe Biden and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a joint press conference and damage assessment tour starting in this city.

Lee County, which includes Fort Myers and Fort Myers Beach, Pine Island and Sanibel, is the Florida county that suffered the most fatalities related to the Category Ian. The county will need a lot of rebuilding and flood-related cleanup and restoration for the foreseeable future.

“I was in such a rush to leave,” said Reyes, after Ian’s heavy rains brought three inches of water inside the small home she shares with Luis Reyes, a fulltime employee of Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Venice. 

Reyes finds herself leaping between worries: What will become of her pets? What to do about her rotting home and its contents? What about all the family pictures, and all the felled trees in the garden? How long will she and Luis need to rent their new Airbnb apartment, a 40-minute drive south in Naples?

And not least of all: What about the extra gasoline expense they will incur at a time when fuel supplies remain spotty in parts of Lee County?

 

CLEAN-UP TIME

“Our next steps are to get everything out of the house, re-do the walls, floors, vanities, dressers and clean up the outside so it's not dangerous to my grandson, who is autistic and puts everything in his mouth,” she said, reaching for a wedding portrait of her Puerto Rico-born parents. 

“Photos are a big thing with us,” she said. “My father passed away in 1969 in Chicago, the only thing we have left are photos. I have seven brothers and two sisters and my mom is 88 years old. Thank God her house wasn’t affected, so some of the family are camped out there.”

A Mennonite emergency response volunteer on hand to help assess the damage noted privately that the Reyes home will probably require almost complete removal of the flooring, all the kitchen cabinetry, and at least three feet of the dry wall. And he noted Florida’s strict permitting system for contracting and repair work. 

A licensed contractor will be required to hook up the electrical connection that Ian’s winds knocked off the side of the house, leaving the home without electricity — yet another level of short-term misery for the clean-up efforts. 

Meanwhile, Catholic Charities of Venice is helping foot the bill for the apartment rental in Naples. 

“I am so thankful to God that it wasn’t worse. The community is coming together, and our family is coming together,” said Reyes, who joked that her temporary apartment is outfitted with more modern appliances: “Everything is digital. I have no idea how to use the stove.” 

Meanwhile, Reyes said she isn't able to work and earn her teaching fee while area schools and normal life are on hold.

 

ROOFING TARPS

Not far from here, at the Elizabeth Kay Galeana Catholic Charities Center in Fort Myers, the CEO of Venice’s Catholic Charities, Eddie Gloria, was loading roofing tarps onto the back of his personal vehicle and getting ready to check on a few families in crisis. 

In addition to managing the flow of donated resources at 13 Catholic Charities distribution sites, the agency is coordinating a fast-moving flow of incoming materials while looking after agency staff and church employees who themselves are living the emergency, according to Gloria. 

At the end of the first week of October, the agency was moving from the assessment stage to a more operational stage as the places with the most needs came into focus. 

Gloria said the easiest way to understand where the greatest damage from Ian – a category 4 storm packing gusts of 155 mph – occurred is in terms of the central corridor of Fort Myers and Lee County, along with dispersed pockets of rural communities throughout the greater 10-county diocese, which suffered flooding as river waters spilled over into neighboring housing. 

“We found that we could not get (emergency) products right after the storm as there was a lot of chaos and logistical problems, but finally the state organized itself and supplies are arriving,” Gloria said.

His agency’s disaster response specialists are moving ready-to-eat meals, water, tarps, baby items and nonperishable foods into the community by drive-up operations and delivery. 

The next stage for Catholic Charities, Gloria added, will be sourcing additional forklifts and forklift operators to manage the flow of donations. 

Local parishes and Knights of Columbus volunteers also are running their own emergency response programs effectively. Catholic Charities is supporting those parishes with donated goods and bottled water. 

EMPLOYEES AFFECTED

At the same time that Catholic Charities was setting up distribution sites, Gloria and his staff created a phone tree to check on employees, five of whom, including the Reyes family, suffered severe damage to their homes and property. Some of them may not have home insurance. 

Gloria reasoned that if the agency takes care of its own, they can turn around and help take care of the community. 

“You can’t ask people to put in 16-hour days helping everyone else when your household is upside down or your children are homeless or your wife or children are not in a safe place,” he said. 

Gloria also reached out to the Venice Diocese for a list of all the teachers, principals, diocesan employees and priests who were affected by Hurricane Ian so Catholic Charities can offer them assistance as well. 

“We feel like we need to target them because they are the ones who will open the parishes,” Gloria said. “They are the ones who open the community. We have a list of families whose children are in the Catholic school system, especially those getting financial assistance. So these are families who maybe don’t have insurance.” 

The state of Florida also has reached out to Catholic Charities for help with special missions. After checking on the Reyes family, Gloria planned to drive out to a flooded farm in Sarasota County where a group of six to 10 farmworker families were believed to be stranded, living in a barn with nowhere else to go. 

“They have food but no solution for their housing. I don’t know all the details but I want to talk to them and see how we can help,” he said. 

“We are now getting into the grueling work of cleaning up and reaching out to families to let them know we want to help the community and partnering with other groups. What helps is that we have the backing of the diocese,” Gloria said. “We have been through disasters before, and our parishes will be a lynchpin.”

YOU CAN HELP

• Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Miami, Inc., is seeking your support to provide essential resources and immediate relief to Florida’s southwest coast after Hurricane Ian.
• The agency is now accepting financial donations through www.ccadm.org. One hundred percent of donations will be used for Hurricane Ian relief efforts. Financial donations are preferred.
• Groups that want to take a collection of goods and transport them over to the west coast should first contact Catholic Charities CEO Peter Routsis-Arroyo at [email protected].