Southwest Florida still recovering from Hurricane Wilma's wrath

Oct. 23--Ten years ago on Oct. 24, Hurricane Wilma slammed into Southwest Florida with 125 mph winds.

For Charles Bartlett and his wife Marilyn, it was a terrifying time.

Longtime residents of Chokoloskee, near where the hurricane made landfall, they were in their RV behind a Dollar Discount store they owned in Naples when the storm hit around 6:30 a.m.

"We were scared and didn't know what to do," said Charles Bartlett, 64. "When the winds started howling, we decided we better go inside the building because twisters could come down and get our little travel trailer."

When they returned to Chokoloskee after the storm passed, they found that floodwaters had come up to the windows of their Ford Bronco and left about an inch of mud on the floor of their home, even though it was raised a few feet off the ground.

"It was salty, soupy mud -- quite a nasty mess," said Bartlett, adding damage from moisture and resulting mold forced him to replace his flooring, walls and kitchen cabinets.

In this file photo, Gene Wilber of Naples checks out the bottom of a banyan tree along Crayton Road in Naples that was ripped out of the ground by Hurricane Wilma.

It took him a few days to clean up the mud and to get rid of downed trees and branches with a chain saw, and months to repair his home. Still he felt luckier than some of his Chokoloskee neighbors, including one whose double-wide mobile home was washed away in the storm and never recovered.

These days, there are few signs left of the devastation caused by the monster storm that roared across the state -- the last major hurricane, Category 3 or stronger, to make landfall in the United States. It caused $20.6 billion worth of damage in Florida alone.

Following a vicious 2004 hurricane season, Wilma was the fourth hurricane to hit Florida in 2005.

Wilma directly killed 35 people, and was indirectly responsible for the deaths of 26 others.

Slashing upward in a northeasterly direction across Florida, from Cape Romano to Jupiter, Wilma toppled towering trees, ripped boats from their moorings, and smashed humble mobile homes and pricey beachfront condos alike.

In Collier County, its effects were felt most strongly in the sparsely populated southern areas, like Chokoloskee and nearby Everglades City, where the Old Collier County Courthouse (now Everglades City Hall) had some windows and part of its roof blown off.

Having been damaged once before when Hurricane Donna ripped through town, the then-77-year-old structure seemed doomed. But funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency helped to save it.

Two years after the storm, the Neoclassical-style courthouse was rebuilt to look like it did in 1956, when it had last been remodeled. In 2013, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

With a 50-mile wide eye, the effects of Wilma were felt throughout Southwest Florida.

Clinton Weeks, 44, then a commercial fisherman in Cape Coral, remembers going to sleep and then waking up abruptly when his sliding glass door popped out and the wind roared in.

"My pool cage was ripped off, and my crab boat was nearly destroyed," said Weeks.

In this file photo, even with storm shutters in place, wind damage from Hurricane Wilma is evident in this Gulf Shore Blvd. North condominium building in Naples Tuesday, the day after Hurricane Wilma slammed into Southwest Florida. Michel Fortier/File

In the Naples and Bonita Springs area, some homes suffered collapsed roofs, shattered windows and debris-filled pools that soon turned a slick, sickening shade of green.

But beachfront condos, which caught some of the highest winds, bore the biggest brunt of the storm, causing misery for some owners for years afterward.

At the 18-story Monaco Beach Club at Park Shore in Naples, which suffered broken windows and doors, a partly blown-off roof, soaked carpets and other problems, condo owners each had to pay $140,000 in assessments.

They received no insurance money for storm damage because courts agreed the association bloated its insurance claim.

The claim was for $20 million, while actual damages were around $9 million. Insurers wound up paying nothing for the storm damage. But a class-action suit against the insurers for the association's officers and directors, as well as settlements with the public adjuster and others involved in the claim, eventually netted each owner a few thousand dollars.

Naples city councilman Doug Finlay said most structural damage throughout Naples was suffered by older buildings that were not constructed to current strict hurricane standards.

But damage to the city's 21,000 trees and other landscaping was significant and ubiquitous, he said.

"I got on a bike because you couldn't drive through the streets," recalled Finlay, who lives in a condo south of Venetian Village. "But even then you couldn't get around."

Naples mayor John Sorey rode out the storm with his daughter in Fort Lauderdale, but returned to find his yard a mess of tangled vegetation. His Old Naples neighbors were similarly affected.

"I cleaned up four houses, and had a pile of wood about 12 feet wide and 10 feet tall, the length of two lots," recalled Sorey, who is a master gardener. "I lost a royal palm that was worth about $10,000. It destroyed my banana tree, but didn't harm my citrus."

Many huge old banyan trees that lined Naples streets, particularly around Crayton Cove, came down during the storm because driveways and other hardscaping prevented them from sending down the arterial roots that anchor them into the ground, he added.

In this file photo, Chockoloskee, Florida, south of Everglades City, appeared to have suffered the most damage from Hurricane Wilma in October 2005. People could be seen milling about the island, cleaning up the remains of structures. Michel Fortier/File

They have been replaced by young native trees that are more storm-resistant, he said.

In wilder areas, the storm's damage to mangroves was as intense as that of Hurricane Andrew, a much stronger Category 5 storm that hit the area in 1992, according to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The USGS estimated that 3,000 acres of mangroves along the lower Gulf Coast were destroyed by Wilma's 15-foot-high storm surge, which deposited debris high in the mangrove's canopies and smothered their roots with sediment. While shorelines now look greener, many stands may never recover, the USGS predicted.

Wildlife was decimated, too. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission noted that after Wilma, the pounds of claws of stone crabs landed were only 56 percent of the October averages for the years 1985 to 2004.

Bird populations dropped drastically, according to several studies done after the hurricane blasted through. Hundreds of wading birds like white ibises and egrets were killed in the storm or had their roosts destroyed; chimney swift populations fell by half. Experts say bird populations are still recovering.

But surprisingly, one animal that didn't seem to be hurt too badly by Wilma was the endangered Florida panther. The big cats hide out in wind-deflecting palmetto thickets during hurricanes and "don't seem to be bothered by them," according to a post-storm report by FFWC wildlife biologist Mark Lotz.

"We have never documented a panther death resulting from a hurricane," Lotz said in the report.

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