Sanidenialbel

As you probably know now, if you didn't before, Sanibel is a barrier Island near Fort Myers, Florida. Until Wednesday, it was connected to the mainland by a causeway, which has now been severed in 5 places, and long stretches of road are partially washed away.

The average elevation of Sanibel is 3 feet, which means that according to the National Weather Service estimates of storm surge, the entire island was under seven to ten feet of ocean, with powerful current and battering waves. I decided to catch some disaster porn on Thursday, so I checked out the cable news. They showed an aerial view of the island. I didn't have a before and after to look at, but it sure seemed as though many structures must have completely disappeared. Others were rubble. There were a couple of steel framed high rise buildings, presumably hotels, that had all of their windows blown out. No streets were visible, or any above ground infrastructure such as utility polls, street signs or traffic lights. And yep, I was right, a lot of buildings were just gone.

They brought on an emergency management honcho who said they had rescued 30 survivors from the island by helicopter but many people waved them off, and said they wanted to stay. Okaaaay. Maybe they can scavenge enough canned goods and bottled water from what's left of the grocery store to survive for a few days, but that's about all they can do. They must have rode out the storm on an upper floor of a structure that survived, but I'm sure there are a lot of people whose bodies will never be found. By the way, unlike Fort Myers, there do not appear to be any boats piled up on Sanibel -- they all went the way of the human corpses.

Florida Governor Ron DeSatanist has publicly vowed to rebuild the causeway. When he was in congress, he voted against federal aid for the northeastern states clobbered by hurricane Sandy, but he's obviously not expecting Florida to come up with the half a billion dollars or more it's going to take. He couldn't raise taxes on low income people enough to pull that off. However, hypocrite and Republican are essentially synonyms, and they don't pay any price for it.

Even if he gets the federal funds, which I'll bet he will, there is a problem. The economy of Sanibel was entirely dependent on tourism, and vacation and retirement homes. As of Wednesday, Sanibel has no economy. The hotels, restaurants, charter boat operations, shops, golf course, jet ski rentals, bungalow rentals, all of it, now have zero revenue along with no physical existence. And even if they have insurance, there's no reason to invest in rebuilding anything until the causeway is back in operation, which will be at least three years by any reasonable expectation, assuming it does actually happen. So most of those business people and homeowners will have to go and do something else in some other place. There won't be any point opening a store until people live there, and people won't be able to live there if there aren't any stores . . . you get the idea.

So does it really make sense to invest, I dunno, a billion and a half dollars to put things back the way they were, if that is even possible? This could happen again. Actually it almost certainly will. And oh yeah, 3 feet above sea level is going to be sea level in a couple of decades. So the point of all this is, we need to wake up to the reality that some coastal places just need to be abandoned. It's sad -- it means a lot of economic losses as well as sentimental damage to people who loved those places, to whom they were home, and communities. But they're just gone, or going soon. You can't order the tide to recede.