(10-06-2022, 03:35 PM)NYC4jags Wrote:

(09-30-2022, 11:45 AM)NewJagsCity Wrote: You're a good man for providing those meals for those displaced folks.  Anyone on those barrier islands of Sanibel, Ft Myers, Captiva, Gasparilla and Casey Key should ALWAYS have the good sense to evacuate, but sadly, some just won't.  Same with those mobile home communities.  There are so many in the Port Charlotte/Punta Gorda area, along with Englewood, Venice and Cape Coral.  It's going to be a long rebuild.

Crazy stuff I've been seeing and hearing down here. 
Very lucky personally, but tons of friends and colleagues are in bad situations. 

The efforts from the local responders and those that have funneled into our area have been impressive in restoring power to many fairly quickly considering the damage. That may be the most positive thing I can say. 

It turns out that our restaurant and venue is next door to a large staging area for FEMA disaster relief and there are 400 Army reservists stationed there. 
We have taken on feeding the lot of them breakfast and dinner every day along with our patrons who grow in number each day. 
We have a skeleton crew of staff still, so it's has us all deep into overtime. We also can't get enough food to pull it off via distributor delivery, so we have a convoy of personal pickup trucks going each day to a distribution house in the next town. Getting gas has been tough until yesterday as more and more stations reopen. I worked my fifth 14 hour day in a row yesterday and finally took a little time off today. 

Next weekend we'll put music back on our stage and use the turnout to drive revenue for a fund to help individual families in our community that are struggling to get what they need. 

Gonna be a while before anything feels "normal" down here.

Good on you man. I've been watching a lot of flyovers of Estero Island, San Carlos Island, Naples, Sanibel, Captiva and Gasparilla, Far and away, Estero got the worst of it, as I'm sure you know. It's 100 times worse than Mexico Beach in 2018, if for no other reason that the area is larger and has a lot of inland canals with marinas, which didn't fare well at all during this. Factor in the mobile home communities on San Carlos Island, and it's devastation on a scale that I haven't seen as a Floridian since Andrew. Seeing mobile home parks with nothing left but slabs and then a quarter mile north all those mobile homes piled up on top of each other like Lego building blocks is something to behold. Same with the boats; they are either piled up on top of each other in a 3-high pile, or they are scattered in places that no boat should be: on top of houses, cars, blocking roads and stuck in mangroves. Never mind all the ones that must have sunk. It's destruction beyond belief, until you watch some of the storm footage as it happened on the Wednesday it made landfall. Then you can believe it. Once the first responders finish their search and rescue operation and they allow volunteers back in, I'm hoping to get down there to contribute to the recovery efforts.

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