Rain sidelines recovery efforts for Cape Coral tornado victims

CAPE CORAL, Fla. – Not even three weeks after homes were torn apart by EF2 tornado, homeowners’ repairs are being dampened by continuous showers, Cape Coral’s hardest hit residents said.

In southwest Cape Coral where damages were the most troubling, some houses were without tarps. Heather Lovejoy’s home had a protective tarp on its roof, but the needed repairs to her house have been delayed due to this week’s rainstorms.

“We can’t get the roofers out to actually get an assessment of the damage that we have, simply because of the rain and it’s been reschedule now several times,” she said.

Lovejoy said she is hoping to move past the tornado, but that the rain was making it difficult.

“The noise from the tarps on the roof can be kind of alarming because it’s so loud,” Lovejoy said. “It brings you back to when the F2 came through.”

Lovejoy joins about 200 other residents with homes needing repairs. Cape Coral city council approved a $1.2 million budget for tornado cleanup, but Denise Kidd of Affordable Roofing said construction crews have been sidelined by rain.

“The rain slows work down,” Kidd said. “Roofers can not work in the rain and it has given us a backlog, which were happy to do, but it slows everybody down.”

Two days of continuous rain left hardly no parts of Southwest Florida unaffected. Areas just north of southwest Cape Coral received nearly eight inches of rain in the short period of time.

Lovejoy said Cape Coral residents are getting exhausted.

“I think everybody is just a little tired of it and just hoping that whatever damage they have stays and the level that it’s at doesn’t get any worse,” she said.