FT. MYERS BEACH, Fla — Ground Zero. That is the area most destroyed in the path of Hurricane Ian.
Officials have zeroed in on Ft. Myers Beach, and first responders that have finished their work in other areas hit by the hurricane have pivoted their focus to the island because the need is so vast.
The humming of emergency response vehicles has taken the place of crashing waves and laughter in nearby restaurants and bars.
When asked what he feels when he looks around at the damage, Steve Griffin said, “Sickness.”
The loss on Ft. Myers beach is incomprehensible and finding words to describe how it feels to ride down neighborhood side streets is incredibly hard. Perhaps even harder to understand is what the storm surge was like.
“You see a lot of things on TV and think, 'Ah, it’s TV.' See it in real life,” Griffin said. “There are people that died down there. People we know have died because we couldn’t get them into the rafters. The guy couldn’t pull him up, he was too heavy, and he died.”
ABC Action News reporter Heather Leigh and photojournalist Michael Brantley found Steve Griffin and his wife Diana riding their bikes down what’s left of Estero Blvd.
“What do we do now?” Griffin asked. “The hurricane we got, but what do we do now?”
The first step is search and rescue to locate people still alive.
“We arrived here in Fort Myers beach Wednesday at 10 p.m.,” the South Florida Urban Search and Rescue Taskforce 2 team spokesperson Captain Ignatius Carroll said.
In the first 48 hours, crews found 1,000 people, and 200 of them wanted off the island right away. Others who decided to stay are now wavering on that decision.
“They realize that after 72 hours, you have no food, no water, you have exhausted your supplies, and there’s no infrastructure in place, no stores open to replenish it and stay on the island,” Captain Carroll said.
Of course, another part of the mission is to find people who didn’t make it.
“The worst thing is people losing their life,” Taskforce 2's heavy equipment and rigging specialist Scott Bayne said. “You can’t do anything that’s worse than that.”
The reality is, combing through debris on the more than six-mile island is daunting and will take a lot of time.
Houses are destroyed, and some are leveled. There are trees and cars everywhere.
Many of the homes that are still standing are structurally unsafe. Bayne said their team is made up of structural engineers that determine the areas safe to search.
“They’re trained in this area, they help us make the decision to mitigate that to allow us to make entry, or we say it’s a no go, we can’t search a structure because we have to make sure we’re safe enough to help others,” he said.
Griffin and his wife told us they’re going to stay even though rescue crews have said it’s best to leave.
“For one thing, we live here. Second, our resources are tied up. We don’t have the resources of everyone else,” Griffin said. “We have what we have. This is our home, and we’re going to stay in our home until they say you physically have to go.”
Figuring out what comes next won’t be easy, but rescue teams said the town must first stabilize. It’s a process they are working to accomplish around the clock.
