Fear and Looting on the Hurricane Trail

STEVE REID
Editor & Publisher
sreid@lbknews.com

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
No, this Fall was simply the worst of times.
The Yankees lost, the Presidential election was nothing short of insanity, my hero Rafa Nadal suffered the most rapid decline in tennis ever witnessed and not one but two hurricanes were gracious enough to devastate our region.
And although the literal destruction – the toppled trees, the soggy drywall and the flipped boats – can all be repaired in and over time, another more significant fear has emerged. That is the damage to our faith and belief.
The storms hit us on an existential level that few escaped.
How many said goodbye to their homes when Milton was approaching?
How many turned silent and came close to tears when the news said it made landfall on Siesta Key?
How many came home to see a lifetime of memories and work trashed as if a million burglars ransacked ran rampant?
And today, how many are overwhelmed making sense of all of the decisions of building and rebuilding and insurance and elevating and renovating? Things many did wish to ponder in their final decade or two of life.

Talking trauma on the tennis court
A difficult outcome from the recent hurricanes is the fear and emotional withdrawal some people feel toward our region and their homes.
Since I play tennis at the Longboat Key Club, the Longboat Key Public Tennis Center, the Bird Key Yacht Club and in Downtown Sarasota’s Payne Park, I’ve been subject to many strange and emotional conversations following the hurricane.
At first, it was almost like a bunch of veterans coming back from the war. We would cautiously look at each other and say in a low voice like at a funeral, “How did you make out?”
Some of my friends lost their homes and contents and so I kept my whining about my fallen trees and ruined landscaping to a minimum. It is hard to come back from a war and complain to your friend paralyzed in a wheelchair that you got a scrape. We all cautiously sized up each other’s damages. But each home, each economic situation and each person’s grit and temperament tells a different story.
One friend owns his home outright and he and his wife were self-insured (euphemism for no insurance). After two feet of water rendered their home a total loss, they are trying to make lemonade out of the flood damage. They don’t have the money to build a new elevated home to simply move back into, so they are going to perform a fast renovation and sell, which they hope will bring a modest return over land value.
When I asked if it might make more sense to build an elevated home, they made a case that the additional construction cost could not be recaptured since the street they are on is not on a canal and mostly has on-grade homes.
I don’t know how a realtor answers the question when this home goes on the market and they are asked, “Didn’t this home get completely flooded last year?” And the answer will be: “Yes, it did. But why don’t you move on in and give it a go and see if it happens again and then if it exhausts you and you don’t have the resources to rebuild call me and I’ll sell it for you.”

A painful and difficult rainbow…
I found myself selfishly angry and upset that my friend and his wife are simply moving away. I would ask, “How can you leave the island, it’s so beautiful this was your dream?”
I could tell I was hitting up against an emotional and financial reality. The storm forced them to divest financially and out of necessity, emotionally, from their island beach dream.
This is representative of a deep well of sadness and hardship. There are hundreds of owners who could afford their original older homes on grade and they simply were living out their years on a fixed income. They do not have eight hundred thousand dollars in liquidity to build a new home.
In many ways this is the epitome of what I call the gentrification factor of hurricanes. Most on-grade homes will either now or in the near future be rebuilt as modern storm-resistant structures.
The hurricanes will have the de facto outcome of sweeping away property owners who don’t have the means and resources to plop down a fortress with the first floor at about 16 feet above grade.
These next generation homes will drive a new level of valuations and will be able to withstand perhaps a generation of mega storms.
But there is some good that is coming out of our collective hurricane experience.

Points of light…
There is something that happens in the wake of a war or after a hurricane or after a death or any disaster that is most beautiful.
Sure, there is pillage and looting following a hurricane. But the most human aspect of human nature is the drive of life to come back stronger, to repair, to fix, to replant what was washed away by the briny saltwater. To see an old home that was flooded and used for 40 years and envision something stronger and newer in a world that is a little edgier and more dangerous is part of our DNA.
The storms also made people evaluate the fundamentals: their families, their priorities, why they are here what they like to do what they love about the area.
Hurricanes instill a primal fear and respect for nature. The same nature Western culture has spent a couple thousand years battling and separating itself from only to have it reappear in the living room as a flood.
Hurricanes turn every homeowner into a minor league gladiator in their front yard. We all become a mini version of young Russell Crow and instead of fighting for Rome we’re fighting for our little postage stamp that we’ve managed to accumulate in this world.
Our homes form the stage for our entire lives and our community is nothing less than a collection of people who all enjoy overlapping lives and activities.

Do not retreat to suburban hell like Lakewood Ranch.
The greatest damage from the hurricane is people leaving the area who simply say they cannot deal with the chance of more storms. I do not like this fear. I also do not want those who don’t have the resources to stay to be forced into the bland blight of moving further east.
We are all captains on this ship and we have an obligation to our community to rebuild and make it as strong and beautiful and compelling as possible.
And if our lot in life is to have stronger storms than the poignancy and the impact should be felt and it should propel us to make the most difficult societal changes. But to flee to higher land and go to some safe place in Ohio or in Georgia or in Lakewood Ranch to me that is a retreat from life.
I love my vulnerable barrier island. I love being on the precipice in the most beautiful pocket of land in the United States. We’ve had three storms in one year. It was horrible. I never want to go through it again.
But if I’m going to go through a hurricane, I can’t think of a better community. I couldn’t have a better group of friends. And when I take my kids on a scooter ride late at night and we see the crescent moon casting dappled light across the waves off the Gulf of Mexico, I realize I do not want to ever leave this magical place.
After all, Rome was sacked, pillaged and burned many times. Seventy percent of Rome was destroyed by fire while Emperor Nero played his fiddle.
We are in better hands and in a better place on Longboat, Lido Bird and Siesta Key and Downtown Sarasota. This is our epicenter. Let’s just pray that the old Roman idiom does become rephrased into “All Hurricanes lead to Sarasota.”