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Marge Gonzalez returned to a home full of muck, a muddy imprint of Hurricane Ian’s catastrophic storm surge.
She grabbed a mop.
We’ll just get this floor cleaned up, she thought.
It was fall 2022, a handful of days after the Category 4-plus storm made landfall about twenty miles from her Cape Coral, Florida, home. Ian had rapidly intensified in the Gulf of Mexico’s warm water and devastated Cape Coral and the rest of coastal Lee County, where the storm surge rose up to fifteen feet and killed thirty-six people.
The overall death toll was 156.
Gonzalez evacuated for the storm but could not escape the aftermath.
Marge Gonzalez plays her grand piano, salvaged from Hurricane Ian, at her home in Cape Coral, Florida.
The 83-year-old mopped for what felt like twelve hours straight. Still, the damp, putrid smell clung to the three-bedroom home she shares with her daughter, grandson, and their rescued pit bull. Eventually, they found restoration workers who informed them the surge had rammed four feet of water into the walls.
This wasn’t just a mess. This was a disaster.
“It was kind of a wake-up call for everybody,” says Gonzalez.
Her home had never flooded before Ian, yet the storm caused $300,000 in damage. Restoration workers gutted her home and trashed her belongings apart from a grand piano. “It was just too heavy for them to throw out.”
In the midst of the chaos, Gonzalez found solace in the messages of concern and offers of help from the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fort Myers, of which she’d been a member since the early 2000s.
“I do feel a great power in community and this, I think, is a great thing Unitarian Universalism contributes,” Gonzalez says. “I felt the warmth of the community.”
UU Congregation of Fort Myers Becomes a Refuge
Rev. Sue Gabrielson is at the helm of the Fort Myers UU community.
When Ian struck, Gabrielson was in Costa Rica. She’d been commuting to Fort Myers once a month to serve.
From afar, Gabrielson arranged for the Unitarian Universalist Trauma Response Ministry to host a service by Zoom, helped the congregation receive a $30,000 grant from the UUA Disaster Relief Fund, and began reaching out to congregants to assess needs.
About 90 percent of the congregation of roughly 150 members suffered property losses from Ian, estimated Gabrielson. “Very few people were unscathed.”
Gabrielson felt the need to be in Fort Myers. “So much of what ministers have is presence, and I wasn’t even sure what we were coming to or how we were going to be able to help, but I trusted that that would unfold,” she says.
She and her husband moved from Costa Rica into her church office, where they slept on air mattresses. The Fort Myers UU property, several miles inland, had largely been spared, but sustained about $50,000 in damage. The church became a refuge from the disaster. Congregants came for showers, to do laundry, to share meals and worship.
“People just needed to be together,” says Gabrielson.
Amid Hurricane Ian Recovery, an Uncertain Future
Rev. Sue Gabrielson at the UU Congregation of Fort Myers, Florida.
The adrenaline subsided, but the grief and fear did not.
About 10 percent of the congregation, mostly older in age, moved away from Southwest Florida after the hurricane, estimated Gabrielson.
“It’s been pretty constant that people have continued to leave, but the reason they are, is definitely climate change,” she says. Scientists say climate change can cause more intense and wetter hurricanes.
Meanwhile, hurricane recovery dragged on.
Gonzalez and her family were displaced for about seven months while their home was rebuilt. During that time, her UU congregation offered normalcy, comfort, and furniture to replace what was lost, including a recliner that became Gonzalez’s favorite reading chair.
This spring, Gabrielson relocated to Fort Myers. She hopes the congregation can move towards climate action through more engagement with SWFL RESET Center, an environmental group housed on its campus.
Gonzalez feels fresh energy in the congregation, yet she’s uncertain about staying in Southwest Florida with its rising insurance and storm vulnerability. “I’m feeling like I can’t go through this again.”
She also wants to protect an inheritance for her daughter, who has a disability. “I’m thinking I would leave her a house, and now I'm thinking maybe I better leave her a different house.”