FORT MYERS, Fla — When you drive through Iona one year after Hurricane Ian, you’ll see construction, abandoned buildings, piles of hurricane debris, and buildings that have been repaired.
It just depends on where you turn.
"I knew I wanted to be here,” Roger Hubbard says. Hubbard lives in the Sunshine Mobile Home Park, on Davis Rd.
It took major wind and water damage in the storm, but he was able to get it fixed within weeks.
That made him one of the few people who was able to spend most of the last year in the neighborhood.
“Yes, a little lonely at night, but other than that it’s not a problem,” he says.
If you turn away from his house and look down the road, you’ll see what’s left of Ewa Neocleous’ house.
It’s still standing, but it’s still so badly damaged from the hurricane, that she can’t live there.
"I was actually in the home, with my mom when the storm came in,” Neocleous says. “We stayed and we had to be rescued. We thought that was the worst, but now it’s a year later and my home is still not being fixed.”
Neocleous says she’s been in a year-long battle with her insurance and mortgage companies.
“I slept in the car for two months. I slept in my lanai for two weeks,” she says.
Neocleous says she’s in FEMA housing now. But she has no idea when she’ll be able to come back home to Iona.
The same kind of recovery differences are happening across Davis Rd on Pine Needle Way, as well.
In days after Hurricane Ian we spoke to a man who says he had to hold on to a wall in his lanai to save himself from being swept away in several feet of storm surge.
Today, his lanai and the entire apartment building are dried out and repaired, and people have moved back in, but everyone who lived in the building before the storm has moved away.
Down the street, at another apartment complex, where a woman told us she crawled out of a first-floor window and swam to a second-floor balcony during the storm; the building sits empty, still gutted from post-storm clean-up.
There is rebuilding going on. Across the street from Hubbard crews are building a mobile home structure that will sit on top of 8-foot posts.
“New construction coming in and the lots are being sold,” he says. "People are renovating the houses and a lot of the ones that were destroyed have been taken down and carried away."
Even if his neighbor, Neocleous, doesn’t have the same optimism, they both say what they’re looking forward to right now is life returning to normal.
