Life in the pink motel, a year after Hurricane Ian

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

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🗓️ 2 October 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

El Rancho Motel in North Fort Myers, Fla., has become a lifeline for survivors of the storm. But one year later, its residents are desperate to move on.

It’s been just over a year since Hurricane Ian wrought havoc on the Gulf Coast of Florida. The storm killed at least 150 people directly or indirectly and caused $112 billion in damage — the costliest storm in the state’s history. There has been major progress — billions spent on rebuilding. But an unknown number of people are still displaced, because neither the state nor federal government has been keeping close track of them.

Disaster after disaster, federal and state governments have struggled to find housing for scores of people with nowhere else to go. So across the nation, budget motels such as El Rancho in North Fort Myers have become a refuge for disaster survivors.

Climate reporter Brianna Sacks has visited El Rancho repeatedly over the past year to see how its tenants are trying to rebuild their lives. Today on “Post Reports,” she brings us the story of one family for whom the motel has become a lifeline. And she explains why they desperately want to move out.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's been a few months since I've been in this area of North Fort Myers last time I was
0:09.6	here was in June reporting on the heat wave and this part of North Fort Myers is a bit
0:18.6	more rundown. The trailer parks are filled with old mobile homes that are kind of stacked
0:33.2	close together. There's a little bit less of the blue tarps on the roofs than last time
0:43.8	which is a good thing that the blue tarps are show that there was hurricane damage to the
0:50.4	roofs and it's been almost a year and there's still quite a lot of blue tarps around but I do notice
0:57.7	less than when I was here in June. That's climate reporter Brianna Sachs during a trip to Fort Myers
1:05.5	last month. It's been just over a year since Hurricane Ian hit this city on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
1:12.7	The storm caused more than 112 billion dollars in damages. It was the third costliest hurricane
1:19.5	to ever hit the U.S. It killed at least 150 people and destroyed or damaged nearly 35,000 homes.
1:28.6	Brianna was there in the aftermath of the storm and she's gone back every few months since then
1:34.6	to visit this one particular motel.
1:46.9	The El Rancho motel is kind of on the main drag. It's hard to miss. It's this bright pink
1:55.5	collection of old kind of stucco buildings in a semicircle that looks like a giant flamingo should be
2:07.8	there. I'm pulling up to the El Rancho motel now and color TV by RCA sign is still there.
2:26.5	Yeah, I wonder if that sign was always kind of a skew and empty like that or if that was a hurricaneian thing.
2:41.5	For Brianna, this motel revealed something about the aftermath of the storm. So I wanted to go back
2:48.2	there because in the weeks, months, years after a disaster, there's all these people who
2:55.1	were already living on the edge and they disappear and we don't hear from them. We don't really know
3:01.3	what happens to them. We don't know where they go where they end up. They end up at places like
3:05.4	the El Rancho motel. The motel has become a lifeline for around a dozen families who lost their homes
3:15.5	and yet many have come to feel trapped in their rooms. They're not supposed to be homes for people
	...

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