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Hurricane Ian and Official Tips
By Andrew Fraieli
Up to 15 foot water surges and 165 mph winds blasted Fort Myers Beach last year, causing about 150 direct and indirect deaths, with more than 19,000 structures destroyed or severely damaged. The source, as Florida enters hurricane season once again, was hurricane Ian.
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According to estimates by the state Office of Insurance Regulation, more than 100,000 insurance claims are still open and unpaid or paid but not fully settled as of June. Many of these people are in limbo, displaced by the hurricane and struggling to find a place to stay, a way to eat and even shower.
“There’s a lot of us like me that are displaced. Nowhere to go,” Michael Cellura, 58, told the Associated Press in May next to his older Infiniti sedan where he’s been living since. “There’s a lot of homeless out here, a lot of people living in tents, a lot of people struggling.”
Hurricane Ian is not the first hurricane in Florida to lead to enormous displacement and homelessness, and it won’t be the last.
PBS reported in Bay County Florida in 2018 that tents and makeshift shelters were still abundant six weeks after Hurricane Michael hit with 98,000 people asking for government help, and almost 8,000 residents were still homeless months later. Dennis Myrick, AP reported, had no home insurance, so he slept in the front yard of his Panama City home in a tent until he was able to get a FEMA hotel voucher in mid-January.
“It’s pure hell, man,” Myrick told AP. “The wind blows, and you get wet. I had to hold the tent down with my hands. It was about to blow away.”
From 2008 to 2022, 7.5 million people were displaced in the U.S. due to storms, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, with almost half a million being in 2022 alone.
If you are experiencing homelessness, or do not have immediate shelter available, the Florida Attorney General suggests checking FEMA.gov or floridadisaster.org/shelters for an index of shelters available by county. These sites also include maps of evacuation zones and flood zones.
