"We're Not Giving Up On Sanibel"

They raised their children there. They came to know most of the island’s 6,000 permanent residents. They established their medical practices — his in dermatology, hers in pediatrics — in Fort Myers just across the Sanibel Causeway that spans San Carlos Bay.

 

They became involved with the Sanibel Congregational United Church of Christ, reveled in the community’s caring and supportive nature, availed themselves of the island’s cultural and outdoor sports offerings, and embraced their civic responsibilities, among them Scott’s service on City Council, which began in March 2021.  

 

Their children were flourishing, Henry as a junior in the musical theater department at the University of Michigan, Annabelle as a freshman studying mechanical engineering at the University of Florida, and Luke as a sophomore at Canterbury School in Fort Myers.

 

They were happy and fulfilled. Life was great. Then came the utter devastation wreaked by Hurricane Ian on Sept. 28, 2022.

 

“Everyone who lives here keeps an eye on the weather all summer long,” said Crater, a 1987 Collegiate graduate who earned a B.A. in English from Princeton (1991) and MD from the University of Virginia Medical School (1999). “About a week before the storm, there was a tropical wave due south of Cuba that didn’t look like much, but the forecasters said it would organize into a strong hurricane and go straight to Florida.”

 

As Ian approached, models showed it making landfall near Tampa roughly 125 miles north with the possibility of a catastrophic storm surge. As predictions rapidly evolved, residents of Lee County, which included Sanibel and Fort Myers, realized that they were in the direct path of this deadly Category 4 monster.

 

On Monday, Sept. 26, City Council met in emergency session and recommended voluntary evacuation. Scott and Dana saw patients on Tuesday but closed their offices in the early afternoon.

 

As the wind intensified that evening, Scott, Dana, and Luke evacuated to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Fort Myers that would become Sanibel’s temporary City Hall for several months.

 

By 11 a.m. Wednesday, the wind inland was howling at almost 100 miles per hour. On the island it reached an estimated 150 miles per hour and remained constant for much of the day.

 

Cameras on Sanibel which monitor traffic during peak tourist season told a disturbing story that confirmed the dire predictions.

 

“Less than a mile from our house, we watched the water come in and rise and get to the bottom of the stop sign,” Crater said.  “We realized that this was going to be very, very bad.”

 

Then the power went out. Communication was severely limited. Other than screen shots from CNN broadcasts texted by friends and relatives, there was no way to know exactly what was happening.

 

After a night of fitful half-sleep, Crater awakened Thursday to a Twilight Zone reality. The hotel had no power or water. Calls were coming in from frantic people trying to contact relatives. Thankfully, generators provided enough juice for computers and phone service.

 

“We had no idea how many people had stayed on the island,” he said. “We thought it might be 100. It turned out to be 1,000. Many of them were elderly. They literally needed to be helicoptered out. It took days to evacuate everybody. There were four deaths that had to be investigated and the bodies removed. This was a very serious situation.”

 

Ian destroyed Sanibel’s entire power infrastructure. It leveled most of the island’s telephone poles. The water and sewage systems failed. Six houses burned to the ground.

 

“As the day wore on, we were flabbergasted by how many people were still on the island,” Crater said. “They watched the water rising. If they were in a one-story house, they had to flee to a neighbor’s house with two stories. There was seven feet of water in our house and every house on our street, and it’s a good 15-minute walk to the Gulf of Mexico.”

 

The news would get even worse. The storm had severely damaged parts of the three-mile-long causeway, the island’s single link to the mainland.

 

“We were not prepared for that eventuality at all,” he said. “It created a real challenge.”

 

Repair work began quickly on the span, which includes three bridges and two islands. In two weeks, it was open to some trucks. In another two weeks, it was open to the public.

 

Once the storm passed, the island remained off limits for almost a week because federal authorities were performing search and rescue missions and structural safety checks. On Day Two, though, the police secured a catamaran and took council members to see firsthand the scope of the devastation.

 

As they toured in a Toyota RAV-4 SUV, one of the very few usable vehicles available, the once-familiar landscape resembled a war zone, and a layer of slippery, gray, silty mud ranging from a half-inch to three inches thick covered the entire island. Walking and driving were high-risk endeavors.

 

“Unbelievable,” Crater said. “It was like a Zombie Apocalypse. There were no people. Fire alarms were beeping from every building. Cars were in places they shouldn’t be. Dumpsters were in trees. Roofs were blown off.

        

“There’re 4,500 vacation condos on Sanibel Island. Even today, not one of them is usable. We got to a point on West Gulf Drive where we couldn’t go any farther because there was an entire building resting in the middle of the road. That sums up the nature and extent of the problem.”

 

Authorities estimated that the storm surge on Sanibel covered the entire island and crested at 15 feet.

 

“It was so bad because the eye never passed over Sanibel,” Crater said. “We were in the eye wall the entire time. We never got a break from the storm.”

 

On Day Six after securing a boat to ferry him across the bay, Crater finally got a good look at his house and found, amazingly, that only the lowest of three stories had suffered significant damage.

 

With the assistance of friends and relatives, he and Dana disposed of everything on that level, which included a workout area, guest room and bathroom, and storage room. Large bins with keepsakes and scrapbooks that they’d placed on a top shelf were completely inundated and so heavy that they had to drill holes in the plastic to allow the rancid water to escape.

 

Since there was no electricity, the air conditioning unit didn’t work, and power tools were useless, so in the Florida heat, they used hatchets, sledgehammers, various hand tools, and their bare hands to rip out drywall and insulation before hauling the refuse to the curb. Electricity, potable water, and sewer access were restored to their home in mid-November.

 

“For about two weeks,” he said, “all we did was work as hard and as fast as we could. That was our distraction. We were in denial. We weren’t thinking about the direct consequences to us or anything else. We were thinking about the next few hours of tasks we had to accomplish. We just put our heads down and worked furiously and slept about two hours a night.”

 

The magnitude of the damage took more than a physical toll.

 

“It was very stressful,” he continued. “I don’t know exactly how we did it. It was just a blur. Every house, every condo, and every person on Sanibel was affected. A lot of people have left. A lot of them are in their 70s and 80s and have a heavily damaged home, so they put it on the market as damaged and walked away.”

 

Scott and Dana returned to work about 10 days after the storm because, though the coastal area had been decimated, much of Lee County sustained relatively minor damage and was up and running once power was restored.

 

After spending a week in the hotel, the Craters moved into a rental in Fort Myers where they remained until just after Christmas when they finally returned to their house.

 

“There’re nine homes on our street,” he said. “Only two are habitable. Several were ranch-style houses built before flood regulations, so they were flooded to the ceiling. Probably 35 percent of homes on Sanibel and 70 percent of businesses were flooded to the ceiling. Compared to a lot of our friends, we’re very lucky.”

 

Shortly after the storm passed through, crews from power and debris removal companies from around the country arrived to assist in the massive repair effort. The total rebuilding effort could take years. The ongoing recovery has been very much a team effort among local, state, and federal government entities, private companies that pitched in, and neighbors helping neighbors.

 

“It’s been amazing,” Crater said. “The list of organizations that helped goes on and on. Politics was forgotten after the storm, and everybody just worked to make things better. Everything’s pointing in the right direction, but it’s never going to be the same.”

 

Processing the events of Sept. 28 and the aftermath has been challenging at best.

 

“You can’t help but be affected,” Crater said. “There’s so much debris everywhere. There’re so many barren trees. Sanibel was very lush, very green. Now, it’s pretty brown. It’s getting better, but it’s been rough. We look at what we have. We have jobs and people we work with that we really like. We have our church community. We have our core group of friends. We’re not giving up on Sanibel.”

~Weldon Bradshaw