Hurricane impacts felt in Cloquet

The palm trees in Fort Myers, Florida left standing following Hurricane Ian last week don't look like palm trees anymore, said Cloquet's Sam Baker.

"They look like telephone poles," Baker said. "They lost all their fronds."

Baker was one of at least two college students from Cloquet, including Sam Buytaert, who were evacuated from the west coast of Florida last week, as Hurricane Ian made its way to shore.

Initial forecasts had predicted the hurricane would hit the Tampa Bay area - where Buytaert goes to school - but on Tuesday afternoon, its track veered south and took aim at the Fort Myers area. The next day it made landfall as a Category 4 storm, one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the country in decades.

Baker ended up spending one night with an aunt and uncle on vacation in Orlando, then he traveled on to another aunt and uncle who live in The Villages, north of Orlando.

Baker attends Florida Gulf Coast University, about 15 miles away from the coast near Fort Myers. The relatively new school didn't see much building damage from the storm, but Baker and his Division I golf teammates are playing at a new golf course this week, because both home courses are closed. One is still under water.

Baker and his teammates have been volunteering to help homeowners clean up after the hurricane. It's been an eye-opening experience, he said.

"A lot of people lost everything," Baker said. "Other houses seem fine, except they had 8 feet of water downstairs. It feels like everything west of Highway 41 - which runs up the coast about 10 miles in - was destroyed.

Buytaert said he didn't take the warnings too seriously until the University of Tampa canceled classes for a week.

"That's when it started to get real," he said.

That led to two days of debating with his parents, Duane and Katy, in Cloquet, whether to ride out the storm at school or go elsewhere. At first, students and parents were told the dining hall would remain open and they could shelter in place.

Then the school told everyone they had to evacuate, and it was time to formulate a new plan.

Eventually his roommate's brother drove from his school in Orlando and brought both of them to stay with him. Sam said he got an early morning call from his mom the next day telling him he could fly home if he could get to the airport quickly. So he did.

As a result, Buytaert was home to crown Marco Mayorga this year's homecoming king, an event Buytaert would have missed without Hurricane Ian.

"It was a good week to be back," he said.

Locally, the effects of the storm also rippled out to a number of snowbirds.

Bob and Lynn Hunt have a home in Englewood, Florida, which sits on a peninsula northwest of the heavily damaged Sanibel Island and Fort Myers Beach.

"This was the first hurricane in our town since the 1800s," Bob said. "Every time they would be headed toward us, they would go north or south to Punta Gorda or Tampa. They said we were hurricane-proof."

The Cloquet couple watched the weather hit their Florida home while sitting in their nice cozy living room in Cloquet.

"The centerline went right over our home," said Bob. "We have a weather station in the yard: it was reporting winds of 50 mph, then it hit 125 mph for about four hours, then when the second part of the storm hit, it was four or five hours of 150 to 180 mph. We got 15.98 inches of rain over a 24-hour period."

The Hunts were lucky, though. The house was fine, the glass doors across the back intact and their solar panels are still powering their home (and a neighbor's). They lost some privacy fence panels and some trees, but there was relatively little damage to the home.

"We lost about 4 feet of fence; our other neighbor lost about 400 feet of fence and another about 1,000 feet, and they don't know where," Bob said. "They're using swimming pool water to flush their toilets."

Neighbors have cleaned up the debris, and they're also eating up all the food in their three refrigerators, as the area was still without electricity or water this week.

"This is the kind of thing where you find out you have really good neighbors," he said, adding that they have been sending videos and photos to keep him updated.

The Hunts' home is 5 miles from "Englewood proper," which was even harder hit. Some of those homes are still under 4 feet of water. Hunt said his sister has a home nearby, and lost her boat and lanai (a large screened-in combination patio-porch).

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Ian is likely Florida's deadliest hurricane since 1935, with as many as 103 victims reported by county sheriffs, and numbers likely to keep climbing. Many of the victims drowned in the storm surge.

"We feel blessed compared to everyone else," Lynn said. "So many others have lost so much."

Bob said they are delaying their trip south.

"The mayor called three days ago and asked if we had left yet," he said. "She said don't come, because you can't get gas or water or food unless you want to stand in long lines. And it will be weeks before they have water or power.

"So we're going to stay right here."