A hurricane or tropical storm in open waters that seems to affect only marine life and poses no threat to land is often called a “fish storm.” Hurricane Ian, on the other hand, was a fishery storm, posing a serious threat to the livelihood of commercial fishermen along the Gulf Coast of Southwest Florida. After the storm devastated many of the coastal fisheries, docks, marinas and fish houses in the region, local fishermen worry that these damaged properties will be targeted for redevelopment and not be rebuilt.
Once fish house owners sell their properties, this will never be a working waterfront again, said Casey Streeter, whose Island Seafood Co. locations on Matlacha and Sanibel Island were seriously damaged by Ian.
“This is a dire situation. No one is going to come back and start a fish house if these ones go out because there’d be no reason to,” Streeter says. “The thing is with these properties, unfortunately, they’re more valuable not as a fishery. The property that I own is valuable—not as a fishery, but I want to keep it as a fishery. It needs to stay as a fishery.”
The leveled waterfront property would be more valuable as multimillion-dollar condominiums, hotels and other high-end developments. Streeter’s fish market in Matlacha took an incredible blow and was wiped out.
“In all reality, our infrastructure’s gone,” he says. “It’s the part that no one really thinks about, but it’s the most critical part. Because if you don’t have docks and you don’t have ice and coolers and freezers and the infrastructure for boats to pull up and execute whatever fishery they’re in—whether it’s blue crabs or stone crabs, grouper, snapper, the shrimp boats—if you don’t have that, you don’t have a fishery.”
Florida’s Gulf Coast has experienced many hurricanes, but Ian wasn’t like anything local commercial fishermen had seen before. “I don’t think any of these storms in other places have wiped out all the infrastructure as they did for us,” Streeter says. “In Lee County, we definitely lost three of the deep-water working waterfronts, and on the island, we lost three out of the four fish houses that were executing fisheries. So, we took a major hit. It’s going to be really difficult to get these fisheries back online as they were until we get that infrastructure, until we get docks in and until we get refrigeration.”