Hurricane Ian — One Year Later: Message from the Publisher
Hurricane Ian was a storm like no other for Southwest Florida and the past 12 months have been a year like no other.
A year of tears. A year of uncertainty. A year of fears.
A year of resolve. A year of reflection. A year of rebuilding.
From the angst of September 29, 2022, to the hope of September 28, 2023, truly a time like no other.
Our Breeze Newspapers story was similar to many of your stories in the wake of Ian.
Was everyone OK? Thankfully, yes.
Were our buildings intact? Not so much. Well, let’s say “partially.”
Would our business survive? I didn’t have an answer for that one.
In those “wild, wild West” days immediately after Ian – as we all scrambled for the precious commodities of fuel, ice and wi-fi – I honestly did not know. With the help of our sister papers, we had published digital editions a few days after the storm, but seeing the devastation on Matlacha and Fort Myers Beach – and imagining the devastation on Sanibel, which we couldn’t even get to – I didn’t know when or if we’d publish papers there again.
Our newsroom team was doing what news people do best in time of trauma, plow ahead and report on it, sending a staffer to Miami (where that precious wi-fi was plentiful) to post news online and scrounging here for signal in “hot spots” like Publix parking lots to send it there. But you can only operate in “emergency mode” for so long.
Then came a phone call that changed it all for me.
It came about two weeks after Ian from a Pine Island resident asking if there would be an Eagle delivered soon. She missed it, she said. The community needed it, she added.
And suddenly I knew everything was going to be all right. Not in a day or a week or even a year, but eventually.
And sure enough, on Oct. 19, we printed 1,000 copies of the Pine Island Eagle and delivered them to about 10 locations on the island. A few weeks later, we printed 2,000. In a month, we were delivering some papers again to driveways.
It was largely the same story for our papers on Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel, Cape Coral and North Fort Myers as readers and advertisers alike returned to their community newspapers.
The readers had been changed by Ian. The advertisers had been changed. And so had the communities and the newspapers. But into the future we marched together. One step at a time. One day at a time. And now, one year at a time.
~Ray Eckenrode is the publisher of Breeze Newspapers. He moved to Cape Coral in 2019 and Hurricane Ian was his first hurricane experience.