Surveying Sanibel Island After Ian; How Much Is Enough? When Will People Get The Hint?
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Crater and I pedalled until we happened upon two police officers who’d just come from the neighborhood where my grandparents used to live. I asked the officers how it looked; they shook their heads. As we spoke, a golf cart approached carrying a woman in leggings and muck boots—it was Sanibel’s mayor, Holly Smith. “I literally thought it could have been someone looting,” she said, referring to Crater and me. Smith, who has held various civic positions on Sanibel for more than a decade, was almost impossibly upbeat. “How far we’ve come is extraordinary,” she said, adding that the important thing was to build “the Sanibel that everybody wants to come back to.” She added, “Will there be tweaks? There might need to be.”
The insurance situation was going to make things harder, she said. Most of the damage done to homes was caused by flooding, and federal law caps flood coverage at a quarter million dollars. Many homes sustained more than that, and separate wind-insurance policies likely wouldn’t help. Meanwhile, insurance companies in Florida are fighting other battles. “Various statutes have created opportunities for bad actors to file a lot of abusive litigation,” Chris Heidrick, the owner of an island insurance agency, told me. Many of the companies that insure insurance companies—reinsurers, they’re called—have pulled out of Florida, Heidrick said, and seven private insurers in the state declared insolvency in the months prior to Ian. Much of the cost of rebuilding on Sanibel would likely fall to the people who lost their property.
When we spoke, Heidrick thought it’d take five to ten years before Sanibel was back to what it was. “But I honestly believe that it’s so beautiful it’ll come back, and people will still want to live in warm climates, and be able to swim and fish in beautiful water.” This was a common refrain. “There might be some new people that come in,” he said.
Nearly a century ago, in September, 1926, the Great Miami Hurricane submerged Sanibel Island on its way from South Florida to the Gulf Coast. Vehicles in the streets were “filled with muddy saltwater and sea creatures,” the Naples *Star *reported. “Everyone was looking for a drink of water—and there was none to be had,” a witness told the paper. Of about two hundred and fifty residents, all but eighty left the island after the storm, according to the director of the Sanibel Museum. Among the structures that survived were the Sanibel lighthouse and the two picturesque caretaker cottages beneath it, which came to symbolize the island. (My grandmother painted them often.) “And they simply disappeared” during Ian, Deb Gleason, the chairwoman of Sanibel’s historic-preservation committee, whose family moved to the island in 1958, told me. “They were torn off their cast-iron pilings.” Like the crumpling of the causeway, this hadn’t previously seemed possible.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-precarious-future-of-sanibel-island
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