For Florida’s hurricane survivors, extreme heat is a ‘second disaster’

FORT MYERS, Fla. - Lying on the floor of her storage unit, wet, with a fan to her face, Kimberly Goulet began to feel anxious and “extremely, desperately sad.” It was from the heat. No matter what she did, the thick heaviness smothered her, even at night. She’d never experienced this kind of unrelenting heat before. But what made it worse was that, because of Hurricane Ian, she couldn’t escape it.

Last September, the nation’s most damaging and costly storm since Hurricane Katrina demolished Goulet’s beige manufactured home of more than 30 years and most of her community on San Carlos Island, right near Fort Myers. In the months that followed, she struggled to find a secure place to live, sleeping on an air mattress in a rented room, couch-surfing, camping, living in a rented storage container and then, just recently, in an RV with an AC struggling to keep up.

The stress and despair from that journey alone tanked her health. Then summer hit hard and early, scorching southwest Florida. And the hotter it got - Fort Myers has reached at least 90 degrees a record 89 times this year - the harder her life became.

“[The heat] drains your everything, your hope. It wrecked me emotionally. I just cried all the time,” she said. “I feel like I experienced a second disaster right alongside Ian.”

Florida is used to punishing, uncomfortable heat. But this year, the state has been enduring the hottest and most humid year in modern history. Leathery shrimp boat workers and die-hards born and raised here say they’ve never felt this type of heat before. Abnormally warm ocean waters and temperatures could produce another powerful hurricane season, underscoring the sobering reality that more and more Americans will endure significant compounding disasters and climate-intensified threats every year.

The past few months of this has been exhausting even for Florida residents accustomed to the heat. But it’s been a different kind of draining for Hurricane Ian survivors like Goulet, who had been just getting by before the storm, and then had their homes, possessions, routines, jobs, neighborhoods and social networks ripped from them.

Category 5 Ian destroyed 5,000 homes and damaged about 30,000 more in Lee County alone, home to around 800,000 people. Many of those homes were owned or rented by seniors and people with lower incomes, such as Goulet, who’ve been further beaten down by much higher rents, a tight housing market, and difficulties getting federal aid and insurance payouts. The mobile homes or older apartments that cost $600 or $800 a month - within the range of their Social Security budgets - have been impossible to find. But for many elderly residents, leaving the area, again losing their community and home, seems worse.

So they’ve taken what they could get: motel rooms, old RVs, trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, unfinished homes, or, for two seniors, a storage unit and a shed. Two female shrimp workers are still living in tents outside the boatyard near the dock, choosing to ride out the weather to stay close to their community. And on nearby Fort Myers Beach, some residents are still in their homes without electricity because other options are scarce.

Residents are adapting to this abnormal normalcy. Fort Myers Beach, while still mostly a ghost town, is slowly coming back to life. More tourists are lying out on the sand, getting tacos and drinks from restaurants and bars set up in trucks and outdoor patios. There are fewer colossal piles of debris along the roads and wrecked ships in the mangroves. A grocery store is finally open.

But they are still surrounded by loss. Many of their mobile home communities are either wiped out, now filled with FEMA trailers, or the land sold to developers. Rows of crumpled homes are waiting to be bulldozed. Jobs are scarcer. Blue-tarped roofs are everywhere.

Disasters like Ian harshly expose and further tip the inequality scales. People such as Goulet often slide closer to the edge because they don’t have the time or money to battle government bureaucracy and insurance companies, or to start over.

Florida’s historic, unrelenting heat dome has made this limbo even more difficult, compounding their exhaustion.

Inside some of their mobile housing units, especially the older ones, the average temperature has been about 80 degrees or higher - even with the air conditioning running. The community centers and friends’ homes they’d usually go to are gone or, for those who had to relocate, are now too far away. They’re stuck in much smaller, hotter quarters, and their usual respites are failing. Being outside in the evening is still stifling, and the ocean, which is usually balmy this time of year, feels unsettlingly warm.

That’s because the coastal waters have indeed been “boiling,” with scientists reporting record temperatures. And though it’s the rainy season, the sporadic afternoon downpours that usually ease the suffocating air have been few and far between. For more than 80 days straight, Fort Myers has recorded temperatures of at least 90 degrees.

Goulet spent many of those days rotating between her 2001 white Toyota minivan and a storage unit. Those are just two of the places she’s lived after Ian turned her home of 34 years into “a total loss,” she said.

On Jan. 1, the 64-year-old, who delivered newspapers before Ian, set up a pink tent next to her former life and camped out. About a month later, using disaster recovery money offered by FEMA, she cleared out the wreckage, repaired her underground utilities, re-graveled the lot and rented a storage container for $227 a month, outfitting it with a bed, small TV, a palm tree rug, artwork and a makeshift kitchen.

She finally felt some stability and relief. It was “a real improvement,” she said. At least it was, until May, when “summer came early,” and she began to wake up soaked in sweat. June got worse.

Goulet stationed portable, battery-operated fans around her storage container and hosed it down two to three times an hour to “keep it under 90,” she said. During the day, “you have to leave,” she explained. But where do you go when you’re not working and don’t have much money?

Surviving the heat without stable living conditions is expensive. Ice is about $8 a bag. Generators can run about $20 a day. Restaurant visits costs $20 - worth it to be in the dim, cool dining room but not feasible every day, especially for those on fixed incomes such as Goulet, who gets $378 a month from Social Security.

To kill time, she stopped by a few nonprofits, perused thrift stores and - since she didn’t have a refrigerator - visited the grocery store every day or so. Most of the scorching hours from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. she spent in her car, driving slowly through neighborhoods, trying not to use too much gas, or parked in a shady spot so she could charge her phone, fans and battery packs to have them ready for the night.

She was already drained “mentally, emotionally, physically, financially” from the hurricane, she said. The months of heat sapped much of what she had left.

Across the bridge on Fort Myers Beach, Jim Morris is also trying to get through the days, “trying to stay positive” that his life will get easier.

Since April, he’s been living in an RV he found on Facebook Marketplace, parked right by the front door of his “yellow submarine” concrete home that’s still gutted. No one on his street, where he’s been for 22 years, has power due to damage to the electrical system, and most of his neighbors’ houses are still empty. But he’d rather be there than anywhere else, close to the beach, he said, because it still feels like home.

“It’s weird. It’s just a lot of,” he paused. “Waiting. Waiting for something to happen.”

The heat has added another layer to the languishing. He needs a generator to run the RV, which he tries to avoid using because of the cost and the noise. He makes a lot of salads, he said, since cooking in the oven turns the space into a literal oven. It takes about four hours to get it “nice and cold,” which is 70 degrees, so he can go to sleep. But by 4 a.m., the RV’s back to 80 inside. He waits till 8 a.m. to run the generator. He then drives about an hour up to Naples to care for his 89-year-old mother, enjoying the AC in the car and in her condo.

He loves the water, but the pool feels like a Jacuzzi and the ocean even hotter.

The scary thing, he says, is that it’s only July. And he will probably be living this way until December.

“It’s like camping out waiting for your life,” he said. “You can see where you’re supposed to be. My old bedroom is 20 feet away, but I’m sleeping outside of it.”

That’s what Andre Bilodeau did for about eight months. The 84-year-old boat builder and former Marine lived in a shed outside his hurricane-ravaged home in St. James City. Like Goulet, he made the shed a home. He put in an old, donated recliner for his bed, a little TV, a small air conditioner “that didn’t do anything,” he said, and then built shelves for his two pairs of jeans and papers. That’s how he lived until earlier this month, he and another community member said.

Wearing a weathered blue hat that boldly says, “I Fix Stuff. And I Know Things,” Bilodeau explained that after surviving crawling in Ian’s 150-mph winds and almost drowning in the roaring storm surge, he was hellbent on fixing his canal-front home, which he bought in 1996, and his hand-built boat by himself. He refused to be relocated to a faraway FEMA trailer and rebuffed his daughters’ wishes to put him in a retirement home. So he tackled the slow, draining slog of pulling out and trashing most of his soaked furniture, belongings, floors and walls in Florida’s intensifying heat, then passing out in a recliner. It was usually 88 degrees, he said.

“No human should be allowed to go through what I went through. Not even an animal,” he whispered. “I was drowning. I said, ‘Time to let go Andre. Let it go.’ I said ‘I can’t do that.’ I managed to make it in here. I’m surprised I’m still alive.”

To him, moving is not an option. He can’t afford it on his $1,500-a-month fixed income, nor does he want to. He gets by, “without women, smoking and drinking,” he joked. Quickly sobering, he said that every day is difficult, and that he often wants to give up and walk away. On Thursday, he fell off a ladder, smack on his face, and had trouble getting up. He said he’s had four knee replacements, which cause him to limp, and his body screams at him constantly.

But he’s making progress. Last week, he finally got an air conditioner inside his construction site of a home. He finished his bathrooms and some floors. He now has a padded air mattress with a clipped-on fan for a bed (even though he says his hand-me-down recliner was more comfortable).

“We have to try to stay alive,” he said. That’s the main thing Ian taught him.

Around the same time, Goulet also finally had a win. She found a trailer and got it on her lot for $600 a month, a bargain, but hundreds more than she previously paid to live there. It’s new and bright, and has working air conditioning, although on Thursday evening, the thermometer on her kitchen wall hovered around 80 degrees.

It’s still better than hosing down her storage unit, though. Her budget will allow her to stay live there through the end of August. After that? She’s trying not to think about it. Most likely, she’ll be back in the container since it’s cheaper, until she feels well enough to find a new job.

“I am just trying to pretend that everything is normal,” she said. “Because right now, it is - it’s all I can do.”