All those things are just pretty much gone." "I ended up having to get rid of all my food, my freezer, my coolers. "It's pretty much a total loss right now," says Ryan Wall, the owner of Ricaltini's restaurant and bar in Englewood.
Huge boat storage warehouses are crunched, blue tarps cover leaky roofs, and business owners are taking stock of what's left. "I've never been challenged like this."īack on the mainland in Charlotte County, recovery from Hurricane Ian is also proving to be a challenge. "It's been mentally tough actually," he says. It survived Category 4 Hurricane Charley that year but Day says he wasn't prepared for what Ian wrought. John Day, an IT consultant and father to three teenage boys, built his house on Little Gasparilla Island in 2004. Saul Martinez for NPR In less than a week a ceiling is covered with mold at the Day house. So for now he's helping his dad clear debris and try to salvage what they can from their two-story home on Little Gasparilla. Jake is a senior in high school but his classes have been postponed because his school is being used as a shelter for people displaced by the storm. Jake echoes his dad's view of what's ahead of them both here and in other hard hit communities in Southwest Florida. "I think it's going to be years of recovery," says Day.
You can see the destruction as the boat eases up to the dock - hundreds of downed trees, brown vegetation, power lines on the ground, and pieces of metal roofing strewn all about. Little Gasparilla Island has only ever been accessible by boat. "This is the biggest storm I've ever seen," says John Day. They're just starting to assess Hurricane Ian's impact more than week after the storm made landfall south of here. John Day and his 17-year-old son Jake loaded up their Carolina Skiff this week with a case of water, and other essentials at a marina near Englewood, Fla., to make the short boat trip to their home in Little Gasparilla, a two-and-a-half mile barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico.
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