Sisters in Siesta Bay looking for temporary housing after Ian

Many have become displaced after the damage and toll Hurricane Ian took on the people of Southwest Florida.

“It was a 10-foot wave that went through the park. I mean, 900 homes are gone,” Sandra Duke, from Siesta Bay said.

Duke and her sister Cheryl Garniss lived in Siesta Bay by the Sanibel Causeway.

“You know, she literally has nothing. I mean, loss. Yeah, everything. Yeah, she only moved down here, like, a year and a half ago,” Duke said.

And, like their belongings, their lives have turned upside down.

“We cry. Yeah, we cry a lot,” Cheryl said.

The water overflowing and rising higher and higher left a permanent damaging mark on their home.

What they miss is hard to replace, and a new home is not easily found. But luck was on Sandra’s side this time.

“We’re staying in Jamaica Bay,” Sandra said. “My brother’s wife found us a rental in there.”

But what comes next for Sandra and Cheryl remains ambiguous.

“I don’t know. To be honest with you. I have to make a decision whether to go back north,” Cheryl said. “Or, you know, I have family back there as well as here. It’s just, I don’t know, it’s just so much to grasp at this time.”

That uncertainty greets Kevin Besserer at the door every day. He’s running a distribution center in Fort Myers for the Royal Palm Coast Realtor Association.

“We hear a lot of stories of people who’ve lost their homes or who have lost, you know, part of their homes and are living in an RV or something like that,” Besser said.

But, what’s listening without action? Besserer and the association took action and aren’t looking back.

We have built this website called hurricanehomes.org,” Besserer said.

Hurricanehomes.org posts short and long-term rental listings that have been declared safe by the association’s members. As of Tuesday afternoon, there are more than 3,900 homes on the website.

And Besserer said they’re only getting started. They’re going to keep growing.

“There’s a lot of properties still available in Collier County. In Lee County, we’re seeing more and more properties pop up as things are getting cleaned up and people are working through,” Besserer said.

That website could be a glimmer of hope for Cheryl. But, for the time being, she’s still in recovery mode as she picks up the pieces of her life thrown around by Hurricane Ian.

“We’ll just take it day by day by day. It’s all we can do,” Cheryl said.

Cheryl is staying with Sandra for the time being. WINK News met them as they were both applying for FEMA. WINK News asked if they could get any money from selling their lot, but sadly they don’t own the land that their manufactured homes were on.

WINK News asked a FEMA spokesperson about when the trailers will get to Southwest Florida as temporary homes for people, but there’s no timetable.