Nearly two years after Hurricane Ian tore through Southwest Florida, the only memorial remains in the hearts and souls of those who survived the raging storm.
To correct that, 16-year-old twins Paul and Violet Schwartz collected more than 300 names on a petition to create a Hurricane Ian Memorial within the city of Fort Myers as a lasting tribute to the spirit, resilience and memory of the storm’s victims and survivors.
On Monday afternoon, their spokesperson, artist, playwright and filmmaker Wendy White, presented a design for the memorial during a Fort Myers City Council workshop.
“Paul and Violet felt that it would be best to have Fort Myers as the location because it’s the county seat of Lee County,” reported White.
White’s concept drawing depicts a roiling wave in purples and blues stretching along the ADA ramp on the north and east sides of the maintenance building in Centennial Park West. It is a theme White repeated on the building’s columns and the concrete squares that make up the plaza surrounding the building.
While Council members were impressed with the memorial’s prospective design, they insisted that, as a courtesy, the Town of Fort Myers Beach and the City of Sanibel be given first choice as the location for the memorial given that their losses were greater than those suffered upriver in the city of Fort Myers.
That’s precisely what White will advise Paul, Violet and their dad, Jason, to do.
“I would recommend, based on the recommendations of Council, that they go to other communities to see if they would be open to the memorial at their locations … Sanibel, Fort Myers Beach, perhaps Pine Island, and we’ll take it from there,” said White following her presentation.
At present, there exists no memorial to the victims and survivors of Hurricane Ian. The 2022 tropical cyclone caused 161 fatalities and $118.5 billion in property damages, making it the third costliest U.S. hurricane on record and costliest in Florida history.
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In addition to being an accomplished visual artist, playwright and movie maker, Wendy White served on the World Trade Center Memorial Committee representing the Alliance for Downtown New York. That committee met with families of those who died in the plane crashes and at the World Trade Center “to receive their input, and we collectively drafted and helped design the memorial that is in place today at Ground Zero.”
In addition to creating a lasting tribute to the spirit, resilience and memory of those affected by Hurricane Ian, Paul and Violet Schwartz believe that a Hurricane Ian Memorial will serve as “an ongoing reminder of the importance of preparedness and community support in the face of natural disasters.”
Paul and Violet not only circulated their petition at school, but also spent several weekends collecting signatures at Gulf Coast Town Center.
In a 2017 article published in the Huffington Post, disaster historian Scott Gabriel Knowles bemoaned the fact that there exists a deplorable dearth of hurricane memorials despite the human toll and property losses resulting from storms that include “Harvey, Irma, Sandy, Irene, Ike, Katrina, Wilma, Ivan, Charley and Andrew.” Since Knowles’ article, the death toll and property damage totals have risen exponentially as a consequence of Florence, Dorian, Sally, Ida, Ian, Idalia and, most recently, Hurricane Beryl.
“As a nation we excel in memorializing war and terrorism,” Knowles writes. “There are scores of national military parks, battlefields and cemeteries around the country, plus the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum and three September 11 memorials and museums. Hurricanes are different from wars. But who can deny the suffering of victims or the increasingly urgent and dangerous calls for service from first responders? The United States Coast Guard helped direct more than 4,500 rescue missions in Hurricane Harvey alone, for example.”
Although there are nine separate monuments and memorials in New Orleans to those who perished during and survived Hurricane Katrina, there is but a single memorial to those affected by hurricanes Camille, Sandy, the 1928 Lake Okeechobee storm that took more than 2,500 lives and the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 that claimed 485 lives, of which 257 were veterans who working on railroad tracks in Upper Matecumbe Key when the storm swept a wall of water 15 to 20 feet high over their encampment.
Knowles argues for the construction of a National Hurricane Memorial and Museum.
“Names of victims should be inscribed and a museum should be raised — a space to collect the archival materials related to these disasters and to hold public discussions on our national agenda for reducing the unnecessary suffering of weather disasters more generally. Furthermore, such a museum would be the ideal place to foster a national dialogue on the connection between individual hurricanes and the slow disaster of climate change that is increasing their violence and frequency.”
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