Crater said insurance didn’t help much, but he and his wife planned to rebuild. Everywhere I went there were fire alarms and chainsaws blaring. And around each bend I found someone that Crater knew.
A tanned man in a backward-facing baseball cap and aviator sunglasses was riding his bicycle toward Periwinkle Way, the island’s main road. He introduces himself as Doug Kongress, a CPA and former deputy mayor of Sanibel who has lived primarily on the island since his teens. Congress and his wife Melissa, like about a thousand other Sanibel residents, remained on the island during the storm. “I mean, my house is 15 feet above sea level on stilts,” he said. “I think he’s got 1/85 rated impact glass. Only he’s got a metal roof that’s only six years old.” there was no need.
At some point during the storm it appeared that the House of Parliament could collapse. ‘, he recalls. They took six of his five-gallon plastic bottles, sealed them, and wrapped them around a wooden bench. They no longer need the raft, but Congress is keeping it. I said to
Congress is a car enthusiast and one of his prize cars was destroyed in a storm. After asking for advice on how to properly assess Crater, he explained that this was really the smallest of his problems. I asked him what he thought about the future of this island. “I think you will get back,” he said. At the very least, he needed to get his house in good enough shape to rent or sell. If many people leave, Sanibel will not be the same. And he was afraid it would go bankrupt. “Mel wants to go to the mountains,” he said. “But we’ll see.”
“This is the future of Sanibel,” Crater said, stopping a few minutes down the road and pointing to a house on the left. It was a medium-sized house with a metal roof, hardy plank siding, and hurricane-proof windows. It was him on a 10 foot stilt. The area under the house was not walled. “This is not rocket science,” Crater continued. “We’re following the code, we’re building the code. We can live with the ocean.” He estimated that about 1% of Sanibel’s homes now fit this model.
Passing a house raised from its foundation and heading to the next turn, two men approached on foot. “I’m in a flood control,” Gage Crowder, the younger of the two, told me. Crowder, an insurance company, lives in Texas, and after Hurricane He saw the situation after Harvey hit the Houston area, but said the damage caused by Ian in Fort Myers was the worst he’d ever seen. I asked his colleague about rebuilding Sanibel. “The best way is to make it taller,” he said, referring to the house on stilts. These people got their money. “
“They got ‘bad money,'” Crowder said. “We have Corvettes, Stingrays, sports cars, all over these houses.”
Crater and I pedaled until we came across two police officers who had just arrived from the neighborhood where my grandparents lived. I asked a cop what it looked like. they shook their heads. As we spoke, a golf cart approached with a woman in leggings and muck boots. It was Holly Smith, Mayor of Sanibel. “I literally thought someone might be looting,” she said, referring to the crater and me. Mr. Smith, who has held various positions at Sanibel for more than a decade, was impossibly optimistic. “It’s amazing how far we’ve come,” she said, adding that the key was building “a Sanibel that everyone wants to come back to.” She added: there may need to be. “
