Less than a year after Hurricane Ian hit Florida as a Category 4 storm, Mallie Critser is once again dealing with flooding at her family’s Fort Myers Beach home.
Last fall, Critser shared with PEOPLE the harrowing nightmare of watching waves wash away her family’s cars and her grandparents’ home as the water continued to rise. This year, as Hurricane Idalia approached, her family took hurricane warnings more seriously, she says. But still they did not evacuate.
“We’ve been through the worst,” says Critser, a 22-year-old associate pastor at Beach Baptist Church.
Unlike Ian, Lee County did not issue an evacuation order for Idalia, which made landfall as a Category 3 hurricane near Keaton Beach in Florida’s Big Bend area – about 320 miles north of Fort Myers Beach – around 8 a.m. Wednesday. But parts of Fort Myers Beach were still facing flooding Wednesday, bringing back difficult memories for Critser.
Two killed in severe weather crashes within minutes amid Hurricane Idalia, Florida Highway Patrol says
“It was really hard,” says Critser. “But we calmed down and said, ‘OK, it’s not affecting us. We’re fine.'”
As Critser was getting ready for bed last night, her sister-in-law warned that high tide was coming.
“We said, ‘No, we’ll be fine,'” Critser remembers. “She woke me up around three o’clock and said: ‘I told you, the tide is here.’ There’s about six inches of water in our basement, and I don’t even know how much was outside, but enough that the spare tire floated.”
He says it might be time for them to move.
“It seems like I’m stupid for living here,” she says. “This makes me think, ‘Why? Is it worth it? Is Florida really worth it?'”
Since Hurricane Ian, Critser says she’s been running a food pantry serving 1,300 people a month.
“And that was destroyed,” she says. “I try not to sizzle because of the work that needs to be done, because if I start sizzling, I won’t stop.”
Mallie Crister Food Panty.
Courtesy of Mallie Crister
She tried to protect the tent where she keeps her food pantry by wrapping everything in tarps and pallets, but “it went underwater,” says Critser, who is here accepting donations for her food pantry. “We have plenty of time to put it back together before we can reopen.”
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Today her plan is to assess the damage.
“We’ll get down to business tomorrow,” she says. “It’s supposed to be thunderstorms all day today, so we’re staying inside.”
Critser also thinks about others suffering from the latest storm, which flooded the streets; knocked out power to at least 250,000 customers in Florida, according to poweroutage.us; and, according to the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, left countless structures “uninhabitable for several weeks or months” before being downgraded to a Category 1 as it moved through the Southeast.
“I know what they’re going through and it physically hurts me to watch it,” she says.
Flora woman reunited with father who went missing in Hurricane Ian flood and clung to tree for 3 hours
Watching reports about the storm, 70-year-old Stan Pence had to turn off the news because it reminded him of the terrifying ordeal he survived. When Hurricane Ian hit, the retired chef’s first-floor apartment filled with water. He ran away and held on to a palm tree for three hours.
She now lives about a mile from her daughter in Rotunda, Fla., in a second-floor apartment. They stayed in close contact, corresponded and talked all night.
“There’s this underlying sense of anxiety, and I think it changed us forever,” says his daughter Stephanie Downing, a 33-year-old physical therapist. “My anxiety is a lot higher, and my husband, he’s a native Floridian, so he’s like, ‘Oh, we’re fine. We’re fine.’ But I think something changed in me. My friend said, ‘If we see our phones not working again, I think I might have a panic attack.’ Because we watched our friend’s roofs get ripped off and we didn’t have cell phones to call anybody. I think everyone here in this area is just pretty damaged inside.”
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Hurricane damage.
Courtesy of Stephanie Downing
Her children asked if their school would be destroyed and closed again. Last year, when Ian struck in September, her kids didn’t go back to school until Halloween.
“It was hard last year trying to make the holidays normal when everyone has blue roofs,” she says. – It looked like a haunted house on every block.
At her house, Wednesday’s storm surge wasn’t bad. The streets were flooded, but the water receded quickly, she says.
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Hurricane damage.
Courtesy of Stephanie Downing
“The sun came out a little bit,” Downing tells PEOPLE. “I don’t think we’ll ever be ready for that… It’s crazy to look back through your phone and look at pictures and feel like, ‘How was this even real?'”
On Sanibel Island, Maureen and Rich Vath are almost done rebuilding their home after sharing their harrowing escape during Hurricane Ian with PEOPLE last fall.
The carpets were supposed to arrive next week. They put sandbags on the front door last night, hoping to keep the water from coming in and ruining everything again.
After harrowing island escape in Hurricane Ian’s Path, couple can’t wait to go home: ‘It’s heaven’
The water isn’t too high, Maureen, 77, tells PEOPLE Wednesday morning. But the tide was coming.
“We are not alone,” she says. “I have many, many friends who live on Sanibel and have been through this as well, and they’re just holding their breath.”
He says that if they have to rebuild, they will.
“We went through it once,” she says. “We would just soldier on.”
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Source: HIS Education