What Hurricane Ian Destroyed in a Florida Beach Town

FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. — This barrier island on the southwestern coast of Florida sustained extensive damage when Hurricane Ian made landfall on Wednesday just 22 miles to the north.

Debris littered the beaches, boats washed ashore and some buildings vanished completely. Smaller buildings were carried away by floodwaters and deposited elsewhere. Some buildings remained standing, but their entire first floors were destroyed.

In a survey of photographs and videos from the northern half of the island, The Times identified nearly 400 buildings, shown on the map below, that were visibly destroyed or severely damaged.

The damage identified above is just a fraction of the destruction wrought by the storm across all of Fort Myers Beach and the swath of the central Florida coast that was ripped apart by Hurricane Ian. But it provides a window into the devastating power of the storm.

Ray Murphy, the mayor of Fort Myers Beach, shared a video message on Friday from the beach amid the wreckage: “We took a real bad shot. A real hard hit. There’s a lot of devastation down here.”

Many of the bayside homes north of Estero Boulevard, the island’s main thoroughfare, appeared mostly intact, but at least two mobile home communities had been wiped out.

The main commercial area, nicknamed “Times Square”, a bustling plaza of restaurants, bars and shops, was almost completely leveled. The first floors of buildings that remained standing were gutted.

Across the street, the new 254-room Margaritaville Beach Resort had been scheduled to open in 2023. In a Facebook post on Thursday evening, the team building the resort said it would “not be deterred by this catastrophe of biblical proportions.”

Next to the Lani Kai Island Resort, the bright blue building shown in the video above, all that remained of Shucker’s, a seafood restaurant, and the Cottage Bar, an old local hangout, were bare foundations covered in muck. Other nearby buildings had been demolished.

Christina Thomaison, front desk manager of the Lani Kai, said she saw water from the storm surge rise as high as two stories. After evacuating guests, she and about 30 other employees and family members braved the storm from the second floor of the building – technically the third story because the resort stands on stilts. “We saw everything get swept away,” she said.

Farther from the beach on the other side of Estero Boulevard, most buildings appeared to remain standing. The structure of a 7-Eleven was still intact, but the interior had been swept away.

The Whale, the colorful blue-and-orange seafood restaurant shown below, had crumpled and fallen over. It had been a popular place for both the ocean view and its homemade food.

Along the beachfront, most smaller houses and the structures closest to the water had been swept away entirely, leaving only foundations or pilings behind. Larger, more solidly built buildings had been more likely to survive.

“Older homes, that just aren’t as strongly built, they got washed into the sea,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a press conference. “That is something that I think would be very difficult to be survivable.”

The Silver Witch, a jewelry and gift shop that was located on the street in the video below, had been in business there for more than 40 years. After Hurricane Ian hit, the entire building had washed away.