FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. — As people across southwest Florida brace for Hurricane Helene, people who live on Fort Myers Beach are bracing for flooding and learning from past storms as recent as Tropical Storm Debby.
"We've been lifting up furniture, everything in our garage as high as possible," said Becky Weber.
Becky and her husband Bill are racing to seal up every corner of their home on Curlew Street as Hurricane Helen approaches.
Watch to see how the couple is preparing their home for Helene:
They live near a canal, where they say the drainage system has been a problem for years.
"Cause right now all the stormwater from the beach, Estero Boulevard, everything else, they dump in our canals," Becky said. "So our canals get really even higher than storm surge."
When Fox 4 Community Correspondent Mahmoud Bennett met the Webers in August, they said Tropical Storm Debby brought in three inches of water into their house.
With the likelihood of an even stronger storm surge, the couple is doubling their reinforcements with flood tape. They believe it's the only thing to slow down the water.
"Just trying to tape more seems to keep anything from coming in. Water intrusion is very difficult to stop. We considered sandbags," Bill said. "I'd need hundreds of them because of the irregularities of the step down from the house to the outside patio surface. sandbags won't hold; they'll slow down water intrusion, but they won't stop it."
Bill says it's difficult to completely prevent flooding, so they're focused on getting things to higher ground.
He showed Mahmoud how they're using high furniture, the upstairs and counters to save what they can.
"My garage is hard to do," Bill said. "There's no storage, so we're just elevating everything the best we can."
As Bennett was talking to the Webers, engineers were out on Curlew Street working to fix the drainage before the storm.
While the help is welcome, the Webers believe it won't change much.
"I'm confident that they're trying, and they have good intentions," Bill said. "Do I think it's going to make a difference? It definitely isn't going to with this storm."
