Fort Myers mobile home residents mourn neighborhoods

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Stuck in his home in a flooded neighborhood, Charlie Saah felt dizzy Friday morning and called 911.

It was his fourth day without kidney dialysis treatment.

Dialysis centers have been closed. Saah’s generator stopped working. The streets of his neighborhood in South Fort Myers, Florida, were flooded with water, door sills flush with the waterline. Hurricane Ian brought 16 inches of water to Saah’s garage.

“Everything is in shambles, the batteries in the car are dead,” Saah said after paramedics led him to an ambulance on the waterlogged street in a military jeep. “I’m glad to be out”

Torrential storm surge and rain from Hurricane Ian left a trail of destruction behind. The contrast between the neighborhoods was stark: across from Saah’s flooded neighborhood of colorful cottages stood a yacht and country club, and down the block were tall, sturdy villas. Further down, mobile homes were demolished at caravan parks and RV stations.

On San Carlos Island, five miles south before the bridge to depleted Fort Myers beach, boats washed ashore to small one-story shopping malls, warehouses and mobile home neighborhoods, crushing trucks and cars beneath them surrounded by tangles of power lines.

San Carlos Isle Maritime Park, a neighborhood of trailers and apartments tucked away on the coast near a shrimp market and marinas, was home to working-class residents—do-it-yourselfers, restaurant owners, and fish workers. Many survived the storm at home.

Dialysis patient Fort Myers resident Charlie Saah is pictured Friday morning, September 30, after being stuck in his home. Saah was unable to receive treatment for four days as floodwaters inundated her neighborhood after Category 4 Hurricane Ian slammed into southwest Florida on Wednesday.

Local motorcycle builder Joe Fernandez works in the neighborhood. He stayed so he could help his neighbours, some of whom are immigrants who he said were afraid to seek refuge elsewhere or ask for help.

“I’m young. I can swim. I can stay behind,” he said. leave, because they had no one.”

Joe Fernandez, 31, is pictured in his motorcycle workshop, which was filled with water after Hurricane Ian.

The Cape Coral-Ft. The Myers metro area ranks 14th nationally in income inequality, according to a Report of the Economic Policy Institute. Florida ranks #2 out of 50 states.

On Friday morning, the 31-year-old was grilling salmon fillets for residents as his four pit bulls roamed the scarred landscape.

” It is not fair. It’s bad. It’s really bad. Come on, I mean – it’s been almost three days. No one came to check on these people,” he said. “These people ate yesterday because we were cooking. These people drank water yesterday because we brought water.

The water had risen to the second floor of Fernandez’s neighborhood store. He said 14 and 15 of his neighbors are now homeless.

“I have things I can share with all these people,” he said. “Even though I lost everything too. But someone has to help them. Someone.”

Carlos Hernandez shows the damage Friday morning, Sept. 30, in his San Carlos Island Marine Park neighborhood after Hurricane Ian.

Fernandez said there were still many missing in the neighborhood. Carlos Hernandez, a resident, has not heard from his friend Lionel, a restaurateur, for days. Nobody has.

“I hope he’s okay,” said Hernandez, who took shelter with more than a dozen other people on the second floor of his now muddy building.

As the winds howled, he broke a downstairs window to save a neighbor he heard screaming. The man was clinging to a pillow, floating inside his apartment. Hernandez saw another neighbor nearly drown. She is now in hospital, he said.

Hernandez has lived here for two decades. The Times Square restaurant where he works on the Fort Myers Beach bridge is razed.

A neighborhood on McGregor Boulevard south of Fort Myers, Fla., is flooded Friday morning after Category 4 Hurricane Ian made landfall in the area on Wednesday.

“It’s like catastrophic,” he said. “The first time on the bridge, when I just see the beach and Times Square, it made me cry.”

In another mobile home neighborhood about a mile north, there were few generators and loud cries of mangled metal could be heard as residents hauled debris into yards.

Bob Palmer, 83, has lived in his trailer since 1994. Palmer, a former US Air Force hydraulics repairman, weathered the storm on his bed. The four inches of rain in her house had receded and the air was damp. His neighbors brought him water and watched him.

Bob Palmer, 83, poses for a photo in his Ft. Myers, Fla., mobile home two days after Hurricane Ian.

“I can’t do much anymore. It annoys me,” he said. “This campsite is like a family. I am very lucky to have good friends.

Meanwhile, half of Sharon Popham’s trailer has been destroyed. The 72-year-old and her niece tried to salvage what they could on Friday morning, tiptoeing around the shattered glass. Popham worries about moving her disabled son.

She has no job to return to – the sandal factory where she worked was in Fort Myers Beach. “There’s nothing there (now),” she said. “I try to save as much as I can… I’ve already applied to FEMA.”

At MaryAnn Galante’s mobile home, the windows were blown out, “but we’re all alive,” she said. She and her daughter were walking towards food aid.

“It’s very, very scary looking down the roads and all you see is water, hanging streetlights,” she said. “It’s a nightmare, but we’re alive.”

Although the water damaged the interior of her mobile home, she is happy that it is still standing. “I will have to end up washing myself, if we ever have to clean the plumbing and all that,” she said.

Galante and her husband, a mechanic, and daughter, who works at WalMart, moved here a year ago. It has experienced hurricanes before. But this one, she said, was different.

“I feel like I’m in a war zone,” she said. “It’s just awful.”