I'm kind of gobsmacked. I know I said I felt my cousin would be ok thru this. I know I said I could make out that her neighbors house behind her was basically in Mar's yard. I found a more definative pic.
@Cindy. Omg. Those poor people.
We went to a beautiful wedding 12 years ago on Sanibel Island. And in spite of the beauty of that place, I've never had such a creepy feeling about the fate of a place as I had that weekend.
I couldn't shake the feeling that the island was doomed to fall to the rising sea. I kept telling my husband, "I don't know why anyone would ever buy real estate on this island. It's so obvious that it won't be long." He thought I was exaggerating the time frame but I felt danger would come soon.
I had forgotten the name of the island, until my husband reminded last night that that was the place where I kept saying the sea would take it. That weekend, I felt like one of those doomsday psychics. But it just seemed so obvious. Intuition can be like that - obvious without a reason as to why so imminent.
Maybe they will rebuild that causeway and somehow they will think they can jack up those homes, but the sea is going to come back again and again until Sanibel Island, and many U.S. coastal areas are swept away.
Instead of rebuilding, I hope they give people the financial option to relocate upstate and away from the coasts.
May this tragic event bring a new awakening in America.
May people move to higher ground and treat the earth with kindness and respect.
May this event awaken people to the truth about Governor DeSantis and Senator Rick Scott -- two of the greatest ever perpetrators upon the State of Florida. And the truth of the GOP that hid the inevitable.
I'm kind of gobsmacked. I know I said I felt my cousin would be ok thru this. I know I said I could make out that her neighbors house behind her was basically in Mar's yard. I found a more definative pic.
Is that your cousin's house on stilts on the right hand side of the photo?
If so it must have been very well built! It even still has its roof with no obvious damage. The pilings supporting it must have been seated deeply into the limestone bedrock, too, I imagine. If one wants a barrier-island house, piers into the rock, and stilts are the only way to go. But eventually they will need a boat to get to the house anyway, with sea level rise.
@jeanne-mayell I've been to Sanibel many times and have fond memories of the place. I read a lot about its history when I was young and my family used to vacation there. One overarching theme in the history is how Sanibel and Captiva were always changing and moving around. The old-timers just knew the land was ephemeral and accepted the fact. The 1926 Hurricane totally washed saltwater over the entire island. (It hit Miami first and crossed the peninsula.) That hurricane would have been a Cat 4 if they'd been rating them at the time. (We have a epic photo of my grandmother standing on the porch of her home in Miami, with water all around. She was 8 months pregnant at the time, too! ) Imagine if that same storm hit Miami today. It would wipe out the entire coast. Andrew in 1991 was bad enough, and it hit worst in Homestead to the south, not Miami itself.
I really do think people need to simply retreat from the barrier islands, but if they choose to stay, they should bear the insurance and rebuilding costs themselves. Instead, everyone in Florida gets hit with an insurance hike when there's a big storm. Being on the high spine of the state, inland, and far from a flood zone, it irks me to have to subsidize the insurance and rebuild (via FEMA) costs for other people's beach houses. One day the govt just needs to say "no" to rebuilding these "sand castles" that are just going to get destroyed again, and eventually submerged.
@ana, yes that intact house is my cousins. After finding video this morning of the front of the house, something was nudging me this afternoon to look again. This pic is so clear-unlike the moving video (frozen & zoomed) & it shows the back. While I had felt all would be ok as I stated before, I had a hard time believing it could be true given the disaster sceens we've all seen.
Mar also got a cell photo from a neighbor showing the water in the neighborhood. From that, we believe her stilts were high enough that the living quarters didn't submerge. More than 90% of the island is uninhabitable, but Mar & Tom are one of the few exceptions.
As for my gut feeling on Deathsentence, if anyone gets another impression from this- as I saw a clip of Ds at a news conference, I got the image of GW Bush on deck of the USS Lincoln in front of the Mission Accomplished sign, but the words out of GWs mouth were "good job Brownie." So I felt it indicated deception about past actions, & bungling of current emergency response.
This is one of the pics of the circular rainbow on a clear day I referenced seeing the day before Ian's landfall:
Here are some very telling "before and after" images of Sanibel:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/30/us/hurricane-ian-sanibel-before-after/index.html
And here's an opinion piece that tells it like it is:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/29/opinions/hurricane-ian-florida-population-strader/index.html
The above post said, I will admit I love a nice weekend (or week) at the beach, although we don't like resort-y places that actually shield and disconnect people from nature. (Old style, relatively bomb-proof cinder-block motels and the like are more our speed.)
Perhaps a compromise is to make more coastal areas into State Parks and offer cabin rentals. Anastasia State Park on St. Augustine Beach is a great example of offering people access to the beaches and lagoons with limited impact on the environment. They have a campground-- no cabins but people who want their creature comforts can bring their fancy campers.
@ana The opinion piece you linked was full of the kind of details that I had been wondering about. My sister, a dyed in the wool Floridian always said that Florida is sitting on a mangrove, not real earth. The scientist who wrote the article you linked, took it further in saying that had developers left the mangroves in place, they would have provided natural barriers to inland flooding by absorbing the high waters, but instead they filled it all in with asphalt. Excellent article.
@jeanne-mayell Glad you liked the article.
Here's another good one that just came out, about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of rebuilding on migrating piles of sand:
Orrin Pilkey at Duke has been writing about foolish coastal development for 50 years now, ever since Hurricane Camille washed away his parents' home in Texas in 1969. The data and evidence are so clear. It is painful to watch the decisions over and over that ignore the folly of rebuilding! Maybe now better decisions will take hold...
Well, having worked with local governments, I wouldn't hold your breath for better policies. If development is curtailed, I suspect the driving force will be the lack of insurance. Now if FEMA would stop supplying flood insurance for new coastal homes, it would help too.
I read an article that said that only 18% of the 10 million homes in FL have flood insurance but many homeowners don't realize it, believing that hurricane coverage included flood insurance--but it doesn't, just wind.
I have spent time on Sanibel and like Jeanne, I have always known that one day it would be underwater. Another potential constraint will be the rapidly melting Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica; it could quickly bring a halt to redevelopment, should it begin. Two to three of quick feet of sea level rise might 'dampen' optimism.
I have posted this link before, but with a fresh hurricane on our minds, it might have more meaning.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/antarctica-thwaites-glacier-ice-shelf-collapse-climate-5-years
@ana I know you live in Florida, and appreciate your intelligent posts and links about the eco system. I consider how you must feel about this unfolding situation. It is your home state. So it must be hard to watch this unfolding when you know it shouldn't have happened that way.
I grew up loving Florida's incredible ocean eco system.
I grew up loving especially the sand bars just off shore. Wading far off shore into the warm Gulf water, I'd feel for the sandbars with my feet, then feeling them rise up and me rising up way out into the ocean until the water was at at my calves and knees. Magic. Then the next day, the sand bar would be gone.
I think of these barrier islands as huge sand bars. Over the years, we'd watch the tip of Clearwater shift around by many hundreds of feet. I can imagine the love people feel for these places, and the pain of the devastation.
@lovendures, I thought of you as I talked to my cousin the other day. I had spent some time looking for pictures of her street and home to get a clue if she had a home left to better understand how to help. When I first spotted her house from a video and could do a screen grab to enlarge it, she was in tears. Then when I found the pic from a drone where we could see her backyard full of debris, but her house pretty much intact, she was overwhelmed, and relieved. Mom was 13 years younger than her brother, 11 years younger than her sister, so I'm considerably younger than most of my cousins. She's in her 70's and the thought of having lost her home and having to start over terrified her. When she told me that I was the only person she'd interacted with since the storm that gave her hope, I recalled your kind comments to me as kind of an aha moment. LOL I guess I'll always be a Pollyanna- I just don't always see myself that way.
Ahhh! That is so sweet! Thank you for that Cindy.
Cindy, your cousin is blessed. If I just went through disaster, I can think of no better person to help me navigate through the aftermath process.
You will be a very bright light for her.
@jsr78 Loved that story about the sustainable community that sailed through Hurricane Ian. I sent it to a lot of people in my town after you posted it. I want us to do that. Wow. It's encouraging to see that happening in Florida. A possible solution.
@jeanne-mayell I've watching videos of Ian and first comes the rain then the wind then flooding. Houses are moving off there foundations but the palm trees were perfectly fine. Palm trees are amazing. I've been seeing complaints about solar cars during hurricanes that they run out power when you try to get away, which is dumb because every time I was in a hurricane in Texas we ran out of gas and then gas would be astronomically high. These people in this community have power for their electric vehicles.
@jsr78 I saw that too. It's a good model for others to emulate .
Also this morning I read an article about a German town that runs off of wind power and biogas (apparently mostly from agricultural waste). Of course this only addresses the energy part of the problem, not the structure and flooding, but it's still very cool: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-germany-berlin-004aa36a74b44435c3a29cac0fc15b67