FORT MYERS, Fla. (WSVN) — After Hurricane Ian, a boatload of work needs to be done, and currently there is a cleanup effort underway in Fort Myers, as cranes are moving displaced boats that have littered the coast.
Those cranes are getting fisherman back on the water and back to business.
When you used to look at Fort Myers Beach, you’d see boats, people and sunshine on the skyline. Now, everywhere you look, you see cranes.
These cranes are picking up the pieces of people’s lives, whether those pieces used to stand, drive or float.
Picking up the pieces that drive is not a huge problem, but picking up the pieces that float is a very, very large problem.
“You don’t just grab a hold of them and pull them up,” Casey Streeter said.
Streeter is a grouper and snapper fisherman. He said he needs to get these boats floating again just to keep his industry afloat.
“They’re more than just boats. You know what I mean? They’re businesses. They’re people’s livelihoods, so they’re going to be careful in everything they do to try to protect that,” Streeter said.
A first-generation fisherman, Streeter wants to see it all cleaned up soon.
“Fishery is a small industry, and there’s really not many of us left,” Streeter said.
Like so many others in his field, Streeter is treading water since Hurricane Ian scattered dozens of shrimping, steel-haul and fiberglass haul boats all over the place. He said the fishing industry can’t get funding to get them up, and they definitely can’t get it fast enough.
Here’s why…
“For fisheries, our help comes in from the Secretary of Commerce, and it takes three to four years to receive any benefit, any kind of funding,” he said, “and it goes through Congress to even clear our money.”
So they need to help themselves.
“I was approached by a company out of Texas,” Streeter said.
He connected with the right people to start getting these boats afloat again.
“I was like, well, this is exactly what we need, and the owner of that company mobilized the crane that’s here and said, ‘Look, we need to get something staged here to save these boats,'” Streeter said.
Neighbors from across the Gulf agreed to help fishermen here on San Carlos Island in order to save their livelihoods.
“On his dollar, a great dollar at that, he mobilized the cranes to come here, and they’re ready,” Streeter said. “They want to start executing these lifts. They’ve got the equipment to do it, the expertise to do it, and as a community, we need them to do it.”
He hopes that picking up the rest of these pieces, picks up the rest of these people’s lives.
“When we lift these boats and we get them back in the water, that is going to be the sign of recovery in our area,” Streeter said.
A 180-ton boat will be pulled out of the water thanks to a Texas-based company.
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