they were covered, water over the mailboxes. i need you to get up in there, and i m going to hand her to you, and and you ve got to hold her. [background sounds] i m surrounded here by stress is els that were in this marina, tossed around really like tinker toys. that was my house. my house is gone. a lot of people can say that today here, lost everything. neil: an incredible week, and it s not over. just some of the incredible images we ve seen throughout this week brought on by a pretty ruthless hurricane ian. many southwest florida homes leveled and communities destroyed. more than three dozen lives lost and now warnings of a potential levee break that could cause a 15-foot surge. in the carolinas, some similar scenes. hundreds of thousands still in the dark there as they try to assess the havoc caused by ian. we re following it all with nate foy in myrtle beach, south carolina, alexandria hoff in hard-hit fort myers, florida, and ache rick reich newt reichmuth
higher pilings, just higher period and even to art arteries to these islands, maybe like the one by you here. that they have to be built higher. to you agree with that? do you agree with that? is that being considered? i know it s early. yeah, that s a very good point. the causeways to access pawley s island are at a certain level. they could be made higher. but the roadways on pawley s island itself are even at a lower elevation than those causeways themselves, and that s a challenge that we have that we re trying to work through. it costs a lot of money, there s a lot of priorities, but we as a town, we know that s an issue, and it s always more evident and reveals itself when we have storm surge like we had yesterday. so, yeah, i agree with you. i will say that we do have, fema does require homes to be built to at least 14-foot level on the
direct hit here. we re just north of george where hurricane georgetown where hurricane ian made landfall. and even though it did not hit at high tide, it was close enough to high tide which was astronomical for this area, that it pushed a wall of water that exceeded a 7-foot storm surge. but just a quick update on what you said about the causeways, there are two causeways that allow access to the island. those causeways are now cleared, although the island itself has not been declared really safe to come onto the island just yet. however, south carolina des moines o.t. has been here d.o.t. has been here, got here early in the morning. we ve got beautiful weather, high of 70 degrees, low humidity, and heir doing a tremendous amount of work to get the roadways clear. there s a tremendous amount of debris that they had to clear, and they re doing an exceptional job. we re thankful for the resources that we re getting, but we did
short period of time, but the rebuilding, it will take years. neil: yeah. i think you re probably right about that. mayor, i wish you well. i know it hasn t been an easy time for you or your people, but you ve been there very early on trying to guide them, help them, told them to evacuate. some listen, some will not. kevin anderson the fort myers mayor, making sure that everyone s safe. he s got his priorities right. brian henry does as well, the polly s island major mayor, one of the areas directly targeted by this storm. passageways to polly s island were destroyed by the storm. maybe he can update us where things are now. mayor, good to have you. how are things today? good morning, neil. first of all, my heart goes out to the people of southwest florida, and i heard the mayor speak, and i share his sentiments about, you know, an oncoming storm and people heeding the warning. we definitely, definitely took a
take quite a blow yesterday, neil, as i mentioned. neil: you did. one thing i was wondering, and we ve seen some drone shots of the island. i mean, it looked like it was pretty badly damaged but not entirely wiped out as was the case with sanibel island in florida. maybe you can update us on that. sure. the damage that we saw in southwest florida in sanibel and port meyers was certainly catastrophic. we did not experience that. we had moderate erosion. we recently did a beach renourishment about who years ago which was fortunate, because if we had not done that, the damage here on this island would have been significant. but the damage it structurally, ill say, 90 miss, 99% of the houses are structurally sound. we lost, obviously, our pier that everyone loved, and on the back side of the island many, many docks and walkways were washed into the marsh on the back side of the island. the roadways have a lot of sand