Original subtitles

We live in an era of increased weather disaster.

Hurricanes are getting bigger

and intensifying more quickly.

You just don't know when it's going to be your turn.

It wasn't really until 24 hours before the storm

that we knew we were in the dead center.

The fire chief called me and said,

you know, Jackie, this is the one.

This is it. This is the catastrophic storm.

It's coming straight for us. It's going to annihilate us.

A nightmare of historic proportions

is unfolding in Florida right now.

Entire neighborhoods are underwater.

The church's roof is floating by our house right now.

It was like someone opened the floodgates.

The situation deteriorating, I would say, by the second.

We knew we were in trouble.

And I had no way to get to my parents.

Oh, gosh.

It is terrifying.

That's what these people are going through right now.

You think you're going to die.

Everything I did was to stay alive.

There's no one that can come save you.

This is survival mode.

Fort Myers Beach before Hurricane Ian,

it's just a funky town.

People come from all kinds of backgrounds,

and they're all there for the same thing.

To hang out, see the sunset, have a couple drinks,

and just relax.

At 10 o'clock at night, if you want to hear music,

walk a few blocks.

There you are.

The excitement of new neighbors every week

because they're coming from Ohio, Minnesota, and Canada.

So we could argue sports and have a beer together.

It was just an amazing life.

- It is a Tuesday morning.

Let's get right to our news at 8 o'clock.

Hurricane Ian intensifies to a major category 3 storm.

It started pummeling Western Cuba overnight,

and it's expected to grow even stronger

once it does hit the United States.

Florida, ramping up emergency preps.

We had heard this all before,

actually, many times before.

Hurricane Irma, they were calling for

14 to 16-foot storm surges.

And we did not get anything,

any damage on the island at all.

So we felt like

that it was overkill again and that we were going to be fine.

Fort Myers Beach has always been very special to me.

We started coming here when I was a young child.

My parents had a timeshare.

And every year, we came

until my parents had a crazy notion to move down here.

And then I followed them shortly after.

Now our houses are almost exactly a mile door to door.

So we're pretty close to each other.

It was wonderful having my kids

so close to their grandparents too.

They were able to spend a lot of time with them.

My parents have always come with us for most storms

because we have a second story home.

Their home is one of the older one-story homes

that Fort Myers Beach was known for.

But for this storm, they wanted to stay in their home.

My dad was very high spirited, good mood.

He felt pretty confident that they were OK.

- They told us, mandatory evacuation on the beach.

But we're going to ride this one out.

We got everything prepared as good as we can.

I asked Mitch.

I said, what do you want to do?

Do you want to stay? Do you want to go?

It's up to you.

Mitch said, I guess we'll stay.

I've always wanted to live on the beach.

And then when I met Mitch, he wanted the same thing,

and it just all worked out.

We were on the beach for almost 18 years.

We thought we'd be there forever.

Boy, there's nobody on the beach.

Oh, wait. There's somebody.

Go get it, come on!

Come on, Lulu.

I told Mitch I wanted a dog.

And he goes, no.

I go, come on, you know.

Getting Lulu made me a lot happier.

She was my little baby.

Hurricane force winds will arrive on the coast

starting almost at daybreak tomorrow.

That's why if anyone is thinking about getting out,

you have until about midnight tonight.

That's about it.

When we heard it was going to get worse and worse

and worse, I said, Mitch, we're going to go to Babs,

so we'd all be together.

His place was in the back of ours.

So it wouldn't get the direct hit.

We were the first home off the beach there.

It's a duplex, an old home built in 1941.

I elevated about 8 feet, so we were safe.

They faced the ocean.

I was right behind them,

and my sister Marti lived across the street.

She was intent on staying because she's been through

so many false alarms and would leave the island

and not be able to get back for two or three days.

So she said, I'm staying.

And I didn't see a problem with it.

I was going to stay regardless because that's what I do.

I love storms and thought I had a pretty good grip

on when to stay, when to go.

- The eye of Hurricane Ian

is on the verge of making landfall

on the state's heavily populated West Coast,

right around Fort Myers.

The impact-- expected to be catastrophic.

The rain started. And it was minimal at first.

It wasn't until the water was rushing in

and we could see it rising quickly--

not just inches, but feet--

that we began to get a little nervous.

Officials say that the storm surge, coupled with the rain,

are the top safety concerns for the millions of Floridians

who were in the storm's path.

Someone put a trail cam on Fort Myers Beach

on a telephone pole.

I mean, you just see crashing waves coming in.

And it is ominous, and it is scary.

The water started to rise mid-morning,

but the storm didn't make landfall

until 3:00 in the afternoon.

This is five hours before the storm making landfall,

and you're already getting images of the water rising

in people's neighborhoods.

OK, OK, OK!

I'm thinking, we still got hours.

This storm's not even here yet.

This is only going to get worse.

- We're anticipating, within the next three to four hours,

this is going to be making landfall

just outside of Fort Myers.

I also want to note

that it's not until the center of the eye

makes landfall that we call it a landfall.

But, you know, no bones about it,

we are already seeing some very strong winds.

- We continue to run to the front window

to see the levels of the house across the street from us.

Look at all the wood just floating down our street.

At one point, an entire roof line

just floated down the road.

The whole roof is floating by our house right now.

Huge pieces of homes.

And it just was flowing fast.

We had started to lose power.

So we weren't getting anymore news on the TV.

So we were really counting on people

we were talking to on the phone.

I did talk to my neighbor, Joanne,

a very dear friend of mine, quite frequently.

She was up in Pennsylvania at the time.

I was trying to get any information I could

about how much longer the storm was going to be on us.

It was horrifying to hear the fear in Dayna's voice about

what potentially could be happening

at her parent's house.

They live across from the beach in a ground floor house.

I mean, obviously, your mind thinks the worst.

They had told us that they were just sitting on their bed

and then the bed started to float.

And I was just--

the thoughts going through my head were horrifying.

I had no way to get to them.

My dad just kept reassuring me so I wouldn't worry.

I just kept saying, we're going to be OK, Dayna.

We're safe. We're floating on the mattress.

We're going to be OK.

That was about the last thing he said.

And I love you.

That was the last I heard from him.

- There's no doubt that this is worst-case scenario.

There are a lot of people

who live year round on houseboats.

They are a neighborhood in a sense,

and they are starting to feel the brunt of it.

My wife and I wanted to buy a sailboat.

And eventually, we saw this boat here in Fort Myers.

But the name was "Katrina."

Yeah, exactly.

So we changed the name, "After-Ten,"

because for us, after 10 years,

we finally bought a boat and lived on it

to be able to travel the world.

That was the intent.

If I would have known, probably I would have kept "Katrina."

You know what I'm saying?

So Ian was coming, and we said to ourselves,

well, you know what?

Boat floats.

If we do things right, we'll be here after the hurricane.

So we did.

We took a mooring ball a week prior.

We knew that a mooring ball was secured,

well-secured.

The mooring ball is attached to the sea floor

through a deep auger, which goes down like 10 or 15 feet.

You're out in the middle of the water.

There's nothing that you can bang into.

And you're also able to float up with the storm surge.

So I couldn't think of a better spot to be

in that hurricane.

But then, by the time they did say,

hey, you guys need to leave, it was too late.

It started shaking.

It started blowing like I never seen before.

The current was just raging one way,

and the wind was blowing the other way.

So all the boats were spinning around in circles,

which is very unusual in a hurricane.

Tracy was right in front of me.

He was a big boat.

I think the biggest boat on the mooring field.

My boat was a tank. It's 85,000 pounds.

But the waves and the wind was whipping us around.

We both heard a snap.

And we looked at each other,

and we just said, well, we're loose.

We snapped the chain right off the mooring wall.

It was kind of like, here we go, you know?

Buckle up. And we went into survival mode.

The wind pushed him. He had no control.

He was quite close to me.

Not good.

I cannot move away.

I cannot do anything because he was coming fast.

I was sure he was going to hit us.

That's when I told my wife that this is it.

There was nothing to do

except hope.

- The time for evacuating is over.

- Those who have not evacuated are being urged

to shelter in place immediately.

This ain't letting up yet.

I think that's a little higher.

Now you have to go on the roof.

I was on Facebook.

I was watching what everybody was saying.

At first, it was kind of like

how we always post about the storms.

OK, this is a good one.

I can feel the house rumbling and that kind of thing.

And then you could kind of hear, oh, no.

Oh, no. Oh, no.

Probably made a very bad decision to stay.

You never really heard worry out of Mitch.

It was something that was definitely

out of character for him.

Oh, my God.

Wrong decision.

He was worried about his bar.

He had a little man cave under his house

with all of his paraphernalia from all the years

that he had gone to the Cubs games and the Bears games.

And he used to have potluck dinners under there,

and everybody would come and bring a dish

and share and hang out.

How sad to see the bar going down the street.

Very, very sad.

I said, it's OK. We'll get another bar.

We'll, you know, figure it out.

And then it was shortly after that that all hell broke loose.

The water just started coming in so fast.

It was like someone opened the floodgates.

Mitch and Mary kept asking, do we need to get out of here?

And my comment over and over to Mitch was,

Mitch, we got 100% chance of being OK

if we stay in the house,

but we got about a 25% chance if we jump into that.

And I truly believed that.

Up until the last minute,

I thought the house is the best place to be.

Until it was collapsing around us.

That's around the same time that Mitch said,

OK, we're terrified.

My husband saw it. And then he showed it to me.

He said, you know, I think Mitch and Mary

are in some trouble.

That's when we both knew this was gonna--

this was way worse than anybody could have understood.

I've never seen a storm surge like this in my life.

You're talking about a 15-foot wall of water

with a storm surge.

There's nowhere to go.

They're going through a hellacious tragedy.

Carry them in your heart.

- Breaking news-- a catastrophic direct hit.

Hurricane Ian slamming into Florida's Gulf Coast

as a devastating category 4 storm,

packing dangerous winds of up to 155 miles per hour.

The wind sounded like a freight train.

It was so loud and so strong,

the palm trees were bent over completely sideways.

We had windows that started busting out,

which sounded like gunfire.

And then we were terrified.

My son's bedroom ceiling

had already saturated and had collapsed.

We have a video of actually

our entire kitchen ceiling caving in.

We knew we were in trouble.

But our thoughts never left my parents.

I was so scared that they were completely underwater,

as I knew we had 9 feet of water,

and they lived closer to the beach, a one-story home,

and we had lost contact with them.

Obviously, there are people who may not

have good cell phone communication right now

on the West Coast of Florida.

The last text that I got from Dayna said she was so scared.

I just kept sending texts,

but there was no reply.

I tried to tell myself that they were going to be OK.

- Reports coming in of people stranded due to storm surge.

- At this point, we're somewhat paralyzed.

When I saw Tracy's boat

broke loose of his mooring ball,

it took him 30 seconds to get to me,

to be close enough to make us sink.

Yeah.

- We were just fighting everything.

We had to have been within 10 feet of his boat.

I was sure he was going to hit us.

I told my wife, this is it.

We were prepped to not die.

We were prepped to bail out and hope for the best.

I had no visibility whatsoever down below.

Basically, it was just instinct.

It just takes over.

You don't think of anything else

except trying not to hit anything.

His boat almost went straight into somebody's house,

and the person in the house was videoing him

coming right at him.

It took us about three tries to get turned around

because of the way the wind was blowing

and the current was running.

Finally, we got turned into the right direction,

and we got free of everything.

Then after a while, couldn't see him.

We made it.

So we thought.

But that was the first real trial

because the wind is still blowing like crazy.

And the waves are still crazy.

And then, poof,

we lost our mooring ball.

Yeah.

So now, we move through the field.

We hit that guy.

We moved this guy.

You know, we're a sailboat.

We have an engine that's like a moped engine.

So, like, there was no way for me to use the engine

to save my life.

There was no sails. There was nothing I could do.

I'm monitoring the Coast Guard station.

And I hear someone on the radio, and they were like,

I'm on mooring ball number 3, and I'm broken off.

I was like, OK, well, I'm on mooring ball number 9.

He's right next to me.

I run upstairs and I look out, and he's within 4 feet of me.

The wind would just take his boat

and almost keel it completely over,

and it would move down the water,

and then it would do it again.

There's nothing I could do besides just watch this man

and his family float by, absolutely powerless.

You're at the mercy of the storm at this point,

and I just lost him out of sight.

We thought that that day was our last day.

You think you're going to die.

You know, this is-- we're not meant to be on water.

We're land mammals.

So this is out of your control.

We have people calling 911, asking for rescue.

But officials are saying it's still

far too dangerous for first responders

to attempt any rescues.

When the water is 12 feet above ground level,

there's no one that can come save you.

There's no boat that can come save you.

There's no helicopter that can save you.

You're on your own.

- Right now, Hurricane Ian making landfall

in southwestern Florida

as an extremely dangerous category 4 storm.

The fifth strongest ever to hit the U.S.

This hurricane is exceptionally dangerous,

even by the standards of hurricane-battered Florida.

We were in trouble,

and we had no way out.

We had no way out at all.

The roof started buckling.

The floor started buckling.

Then part of the ceiling fell on my head.

And I was telling Bob, I think we better go.

Mitch, we got to go.

And Mitch didn't swim.

I was going to tie a sheet around his waist

so I can hold on to him.

It was not an "I love you, man," kind of moment.

It was more of a, we're going to be OK.

Find something that floats and don't let go.

At that point, we jumped into 14 feet of water.

- I looked out the door, and I saw our half of the house

fell off of the building.

I mean, literally fell off of the building.

Just peeled away.

There was no decision at that point.

I mean, we knew this house is gone.

We had to jump.

I thought we would all find something we could hold on to

that would get us to something else

we could hold on to maybe.

Mitch was going to go first,

but he got knocked down by water.

A wave came by that was over the top of the door,

and it knocked him backwards, and he slid across the floor.

So I went first,

and I had Lulu in my arms.

And Lulu jumped out of my arms.

She was gone.

There was no way she was going to survive this.

When Mary jumped in, I got washed away.

So I was immediately whitewater rafting down the street.

She was behind me.

I looked back, and I saw Mitch jump

but immediately turned around

because I had things to deal with.

All you think about is survival.

And I told myself, I'm not letting this hurricane kill me.

I'm not dying like this.

First plan in my mind was to grab on to a tree.

I saw a branch sticking up out of the water,

and I grabbed onto it, and it was strong.

And as I held on to it, I looked over,

and there was a second branch of a tree

sticking maybe 2 feet out of the water, and it was strong.

This is where I lose it.

And I swear to God, this tree hugged me.

It had everything in the right place.

It had a place for my foot,

a place I could wrap my leg around.

Gosh, in an instant, I went from,

you're probably dead, to, this is OK.

And I looked up.

And the first thing I saw was Mary's arm

holding onto a railing of a house.

I just knew I had to survive.

And as long as I saw Bob,

as long as I knew he was there,

then I felt safe.

And we just sit and wait

and watch things go by me, things I own,

things I love dearly, paintings and furniture, go by.

My life kind of washed it away here.

I kept watching my sister's house.

I could see it,

the side of it across the street,

and they looked good.

After about 15 or 20 minutes,

I looked back over at my sister's house.

It wasn't there.

The surge finally won,

and it collapsed.

So I kept watching it, looking for any sign of her or Mitch

and saw nothing.

We just kept looking at each other,

just thinking, when is it going to end?

Now, two of the big problems here

are the size and the speed of this hurricane.

Not only is it 600 miles across,

it's moving at less than 10 miles per hour

and is expected to slow to 3 or 4.

That's roughly walking speed.

It was like the never-ending hurricane.

Most of the hurricanes I've been through,

they've been, you know, 2 hours, 3 hours,

and they're all over.

But this one just seemed to last forever.

Everything I did was to stay alive.

Once you're in a life or death situation,

you don't have any feeling anymore.

You got to do what you got to do.

So I dropped my anchor,

and now I'm spinning on 200 feet of chain.

There was one boat in my way,

and my chain got entangled with him.

Now we're fighting.

We're spinning around.

He was coming. Boom.

Hitting us everywhere.

Backside, everywhere.

And I knew every hit, something's going to happen.

We might punch a hole.

So my wife says,

you got to cut him loose.

We knew there was nobody on the boat

because all the hit we were having,

he would have been out saying,

hey, bro, what's up with you, you know?

There was nobody there.

It was a boat or us.

So I decided us.

One of the toughest decisions I had to make in my life

is taking somebody else's stuff and let it loose,

knowing that it's going to be damaged.

We thought that the boat would have crashed and everything,

but we had to be separated.

There was no question about that

because, eventually, one of us would have sunk.

I really just wanted the storm to be over,

but it didn't stop.

And it was just relentless.

At some point, there was relief when

I could tell that the sky is getting a little bit lighter.

But I looked around at that point,

and I saw that, oh, my God, like, where'd all the boats go?

- I'm really concerned about what we're

going to find out tomorrow.

I mean, this whole community,

we're going to be in this together.

By the evening hours, the mood just was somber.

I felt defeated.

After my shift, I mean, I just--

I just went into my car, and I cried.

I bawled for like two hours.

Because I knew that people had died.

Like, I knew it.

We were probably in the water,

I don't know, maybe 5, 6 hours.

The water subsided a little bit.

The wind died down a little bit.

And then Bob made his way over by me

and told me we had to make our way over

to the house across the way.

It was still standing.

We climbed the steps.

I tried to break into the kitchen door and could not.

So we stayed on the landing that night.

We just kept next to each other to stay warm.

I did not think about Mitch.

I didn't want to.

I blocked it all out.

And I think that's maybe why I made it.

Because if you dwell on what's going on...

I-I don't know if I'd be here.

The wind did not stop all night.

I couldn't find sleep.

I was too scared that the ceilings

were going to fall in on us.

As my husband finally found sleep and my daughter

was sleeping and I sat wide awake all night,

I thought about what the next morning was going to bring.

My thoughts never left my parents.

I thought things like,

we should have made them come to our house.

Things that I should have done differently for sure.

The next morning, when the sun came up,

it was just kind of surreal.

You looked around, and birds are chirping,

and the sun's out.

But we saw destruction everywhere.

The sand on the roads were about a foot on the road.

It looked like basically we had a blizzard.

And I said, I got to see if Mitch is OK.

I haven't heard from him.

As I walked towards the house,

I couldn't even tell if that was really his road or not.

You really couldn't tell where you were.

It wasn't until I got down closer,

and I'm like, oh, my God, the house isn't even there.

It was like it had just broken apart and disintegrated.

And then I saw the pilings.

The only thing left on the pilings of his bar

was that Chicago Cubs pennant.

Everything else was just wiped out, gone.

My sister Marti was so strong and such a fighter.

She was smart.

There's no way this storm was going to get her.

I held out hope until they found her body

in the mangroves across the bay

about probably a half mile away.

Marti was amazing.

After I lost my mother, she was--

she was the mother figure in my life.

I appreciated Marti every day.

Ironically, Mitch always said,

I'm going to die on this beach.

And he did.

He was found about halfway down the block.

That's all I know.

He was my everything.

And...

I cannot accept the fact I'll never see him again.

As soon as the sun came up, I woke up my husband

and daughter and said, we need to go.

We need to walk to my parent's house.

We left the house at 7:00.

It was eerily quiet.

It was a very strange feeling.

There were other people out, and they were walking around

with just a complete look of shock.

They were like zombies.

We just couldn't imagine what we were going to come upon

when we got to my parents' house.

Especially as we walked down the beach

and continued to see houses

that were newer, bigger, and completely destroyed.

As we got closer to the house, we realized that

there literally was nothing left of their home

except the exterior concrete walls.

There was no doors, no windows, no furniture.

My heart started racing.

My husband and my daughter and I

started running as fast as we could to the door,

praying that my parents were still alive.

- We were running as fast as we could through the door.

As soon as I walked through, I called my dad's name.

And in the shakiest voice,

he said, oh, thank God, Dayna.

I saw my parents sitting over here.

They both were sitting on the ground, unable to move.

Very unwell and beaten up.

My mom was bleeding.

And we all just burst into tears

knowing that they were alive.

She thought we were going to be dead, and we weren't.

So it was--oh, I'm sorry.

We lost contact with Dayna

just before it all broke loose at our house.

And I told her we are OK. We're on the bed.

This is our situation.

We're just going to ride it out.

It wasn't too long after that that the mattress started

to float off of the bed,

and water kept rising and kept rising,

and we were just bobbing up and down.

And before it was over, the waves were cresting

at the eave of the house.

When those waves came, I just held onto Lee and I said,

it's going to be a tough one, hang on.

Don't let go.

We're going to get through this.

And then we just both bobbed up in the water

and bobbed back down.

Poor little Lee-- she's up off of the floor,

and her legs are swinging back and forth every time

the wave came in, and she turned to me and said,

Tom, are we going to die tonight?

And I said, no, not tonight, sweetie.

That's not going to happen tonight.

My parents were severely dehydrated.

They were both shaking severely,

and it was at that time

firefighters had walked up the driveway.

Within a 5-second glance at them,

we knew they had to leave

or they weren't going to make it very long,

especially her mom.

So I called on the radio a few times.

20, 25 minutes went by.

And about that time, we heard a helicopter overhead.

I just sat there and cried as they flew away.

Hey, how are you?

Good to see you. Mm-hmm. - Good to see you.

How are we doing? Give me a hug, buddy.

Yeah. It's so good to see you.

Good to see you in a good time, you know?

Good to see you doing well.

It took, I have to say, probably 9 months to a year

for me to stop having dreams that had something

to do with the destruction or what happened

to Fort Myers Beach.

All of us that stayed are going through

the same thoughts in our heads, you know?

We should have gone. We shouldn't have stayed.

We made a mistake.

It was as extreme as they said it possibly could be.

The death toll from Hurricane Ian

has made it the deadliest storm to hit that state

in nearly nine decades.

It claimed more than 150 lives directly

and indirectly and left a trail of destruction.

For millions here,

this will be a very long road to recovery.

These things are going to happen

more frequently in the future.

Our water is consistently warm.

It's been consistently higher than average.

It's well over kind of that threshold of 80 degrees.

Unless there's a drastic change

in the water temperature,

you're always going to have that fuel to give these storms.

Take the warning seriously.

Just because one storm didn't affect the way they said,

it doesn't mean the next one won't.

Three storms in a row could cry wolf,

and the one that doesn't is the one that kills you.

Cheers, guys.

To surviving Hurricane Ian and to being together again

and having a chance. - Yes. Thank you.

- Nice to see you. - Hope it never happens again.

The hurricane really changed my life,

to be honest with you.

So much so that we sold the boat.

I cannot do that anymore.

The emotion was so extreme

that I hear wind, I'm scared of a branch falling.

So I'm still not healed.

We are not able to enjoy it anymore.

The experience changed me more

in how I enjoy this moment.

Eat dessert first kind of concept

is what I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing.

I'm the luckiest guy on Earth.

It's just pure luck that that tree was there.

No one have seen this, actually, until this morning.

I got my tree.

The tree that saved my life.

The morning after the hurricane,

Bob came and got me and said, Mary, you got to come with me.

And I walked down there,

and there's Lulu,

covered with wet sand.

Come on. Come on, my baby.

Oh.

Hey. Hey.

She survived, and I have no idea how.

She was 17 hours in the water.

I just cried, and I didn't want to let her go.

I think that Mitch

told Lulu to take care of mommy.

I honestly believe that.

If it wasn't for Lulu, I don't even know if I'd be this far.

She's my baby.

And she--I don't know what I'd do without her.

OK, so what are you going to do the next time

a hurricane comes?

You know, I'm inland now.

And the water won't reach us there, I don't think.

Why don't you come over to our house?

Oh, I could do that.

OK.

OK. I'll go to your house. Hurricane party.