Cleanup begins: Heavy-hit homeowners sort through the wreckage
Cape Coral residents carried their lives to the curb this week and last.
A bouquet of artificial flowers, the pinks and blues still bright, propped in a waste basket instead of a vase.
A bright red upholstered chair midway up a heap of furniture stacked higher than the home where it once had a place.
Sodden mattresses, pillows, blankets and bedding.
Sofas, dressers, tables and more, piled high along neighborhood streets where miles of ripped out drywall, roofing and trim also await pickup in the wake of the worst natural disaster to hit Southwest Florida.
For those with homes in the Cape’s historic Gold Coast, Yacht Club and near-by hammerhead island neighborhoods, and all along the riverfront and its Gulf-access canals, Hurricane Ian brought more than destruction.
It brought heartbreak.
Concerned about their pets and old veterans of storms past, Carlene and Terry Brennen decided to ride out the Sept. 28 hurricane in their Bayshore Drive home off Redfish Cove.
Their home is now a teardown.
Terry is in ICU following a third surgery after he became infected with a “flesh-eating” bacteria, while attempting to clean inches of muck from their home.
“I watched it come in,” Carlene Brennen said of the storm surge, the most destructive element of Hurricane Ian as it hit Lee County with winds just shy of a Category 5 storm. “It came up over the seawall, a couple of feet above it, and came in flat — no ripple, no waves. It came in and hit the front of our house, hit the back; it engulfed the front yard and the back yard. It came in with us standing there, up to our knees with us standing there.”
At first, Ian didn’t seem much different than hurricanes past — mostly wind.
“I looked out and thought it was good — palm trees swaying,” Brennen said. “Then the wind came.
“It became something powerful. It was ripping everything in sight. It was blurry, you couldn’t see. It was coming so fast, it was destroying everything in sight.”
Wind speeds were estimated at 140 mph.
“It was unbelievable how it ripped everything up,” she said.
Once the storm passed and the surge receded, they were left with much of their belongings destroyed and muck-laden water throughout the house.
They had no phone service.
Their three cars were inoperable.
“For three days we were stuck in that house in the storm water,” Brennen said.
The worst part came during their cleanup efforts.
They had lost everything, including years of notes and research Carlene collected as a Hemingway researcher and author.
Carlene slipped and fell in the filth, injuring her shoulder.
Terry, who will be 79 on Oct. 14, cleared palm fronds and attempted to clean things out of the home.
His nicks and cuts became infected from contact with the stormwater and residual muck, which Carlene described as gooey and oily.
“It dries with all this gray matter on your body,” she said. “It’s just unbelieveable.”
Brennen believes every house on her street is a teardown.
She and Terry are now desperately looking for a rental, one they can stay in for at least a year.
Meanwhile, she and her daughter are still in retrieval mode.
“It’s still dangerous but we are still trying to get our stuff out,” she said.
David Lansdale, visiting from West Virginia, wielded a paintbrush in the driveway of his brother-in-law John Hardesty’s home on Lucerne Avenue just down the street from the Yacht Club on Tuesday.
He was adding a coat of white to new baseboards, propped on sawhorses, for the canal-front home.
“This is not a teardown,” Lansdale said. “He got some damage but he didn’t get hammered. John understands he’s luckier than most.”
Hardesty counted his blessings.
“We had about six inches,” Hardesty said of the flooding within his home when Ian roared through his neighborhood, the hardest hit in the Cape. “We pulled out about a foot (of drywall,) all of the trim and the doors.”
He did not lose his boat although it twisted a bit in its mooring to the dock behind he home. That was a lot better than some as storm surge rose vessels — some quite large — ripped them from their berths and left them scattered high and dry throughout the area.
Hardesty looked around his front yard.
Tools, paint and work materials covered the driveway. On one side sat new trim, freshly painted or awaiting a coat. On the other, a roll of carpet and a couple of coolers.
“It was pretty as a picture,” he said of the landscaping he had done last year, now reduced to wind-whipped branches stripped of their leaves. “I lost a little mango tree I grew from a seed. Little emotional stuff like that. It took me about 24 hours just to get back to task.”
Next in the queue for Hardesty?
Helping his brother who was not as lucky — his home took a wallop on Matlacha. The house is still there but the roof took a hit.
“We’ll get him put back together,” Hardesty said. “It will be fine.”
Tom Dugan, farther down Lucerne Avenue, was also doing cleanup, carrying water-damaged possessions from his home to the street.
He bought his canal-front house as a vacation home in 2010-11 during the real estate downturn.
He got a good bargain, something he takes comfort in now as he has neither homeowners nor flood insurance and he fears he may have lost the house.
“I didn’t pay too much but it’s probably a teardown,” he said in front of the home topped with tarp where the roof used to be. “It wasn’t a total loss but it was a big loss. I’m trying to clean up.”
He had paid off the mortgage and the price of insurance had become prohibitive, Dugan said, adding when he decided a few years ago to opt out, the premiums for homeowners and flood insurance combined was more than $15,000 a year.
“They stick it to you,” he said. “They keep raising and raising the rates.”
He did the math and figured what he could save in a few years would be more than, say, the cost of replacing a roof.
“We never thought it would flood like this,” Dugan said.
The garage took the brunt but the house took about 6 inches of water, which left a slick of muck throughout the house, once they got the water out. He estimates the damage at around $250,000, including contents.
He was philosophical.
“Worst comes to worse, I can tear it down and recover my money someday,” he said. “These are prime lots, beautiful views and I see that happening some day.
“It’s the most prime spot in the country.”
His hope had been to take advantage of those things himself.
“I was thinking of making this my primary home but that’s not going to happen now,” Dugan said.
While the money is a concern, he figures if he concentrates on what he invested, rather than the home’s pre-Ian value, he can live with the loss in the short-term.
“As long as I stay ahead of what I paid for it I can sleep at night,” he said.
Homeowner Scott Steele was among the neighborhood’s more lucky residents.
“We didn’t get any water in the house, fortunately, we just got some in the garage and some wind damage. We were fortunate,” he said.
Ian did leave him a little gift, though — a boat in the front yard.
“It was a little bit of a surprise,” Steele said.
He laughed and then paused.
“After seeing all the other damage, it wasn’t as surprising as initially,” he added.