Sanibel is a quaint barrier island with <10k residents, no chain restaurants or high rise condos, smaller homes and resorts and pretty pricey. Large chunk of the island is a wildlife preserve. Connects to Captiva Island by a tiny little bridge that was needed after a hurricane in the early 1900s (?) cut a channel.
Ft. Myers Beach is the resort town on the mainland with <10k residents. Think more typical high rise condo beach town.
Ft. Myers is more of a legit city with like a bit less than 100k or so that is inland farther.
That’s good, they probably aren’t built to the same hurricane code as houses, and probably aren’t backed by federal flood insurance. So that area of total devastation would legit only be hitting business owners/corporations and shouldn’t have caused any loss of life.
Hopefully the inland residential areas did better. Also I just learned Tucker Carlson owns a beach home down in that general area - near Boca Grande. Anyone going to get mad if I root for that fucker’s house to be lost to sea?
Damn I was on that pier a few months ago. At that time Ft Myers Beach residents were getting really salty about how many tourists were coming in and how horrific the traffic was. I suspect there’s going to be a lot less tourist traffic now…
No, I think its fine, we dont have any idea, I was just pointing out its possible. Doing something like that in a storm surge is unfathomably dangerous, like the guy driving his yacht down the street.
Absolute lunacy if you ask me. Water walls are one of the scariest things on the planet
We’re not even going to consider for a second as a country not rebuilding it. We’re going to pump a few hundred billion of taxpayer money into it, and this will probably happen again within a decade.
Won’t there be some fiscally conservative Republicans who will try to torpedo Federal aid to states other than their own? Ronald McDonald Paul, Ted VeraCruz, and so on?
As a freshman congressman in 2013, Ron DeSantis was unambiguous: A federal bailout for the New York region after Hurricane Sandy was an irresponsible boondoggle, a symbol of the “put it on the credit card mentality” he had come to Washington to oppose.
“I sympathize with the victims,” he said. But his answer was no.
Nearly a decade later, as his state confronts the devastation and costly destruction wrought by Hurricane Ian, Mr. DeSantis is appealing to the nation’s better angels — and betting on its short memory.
“As you say, Tucker, we live in a very politicized time,” Mr. DeSantis, now Florida’s governor, told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night, outlining his request for full federal reimbursement up front for 60 days and urging the Biden administration to do the right thing. “But you know, when people are fighting for their lives, when their whole livelihood is at stake, when they’ve lost everything — if you can’t put politics aside for that, then you’re just not going to be able to.”
This is firmly in the nothing matters / Americans have the attention span of gnats category. By 2024 Republicans won’t even remember there was a hurricane, they’ll just be frothing at the mouth about imaginary culture war nonsense.
Millions of mayo eaters have been getting subsidized vacations on manmade beaches for generations. They are entitled to it by birthright and will act accordingly upon said subsidies’ removal.
Consider this: Five of the most expensive hurricanes in history have made landfall since 2005: Katrina ($160 billion), Ike ($40 billion), Sandy ($72 billion), Harvey ($125 billion), and Maria ($90 billion). With more property than ever in harm’s way, and the planet and oceans warming dangerously, it won’t be long before we see a $250 billion hurricane. Why? Because Americans have built $3 trillion worth of property in some of the riskiest places on earth: barrier islands and coastal floodplains. And they have been encouraged to do so by what Gilbert M. Gaul reveals in The Geography of Risk to be a confounding array of federal subsidies, tax breaks, low-interest loans, grants, and government flood insurance that shift the risk of life at the beach from private investors to public taxpayers, radically distorting common notions of risk.
