Some of the greatest minds from across the country and around the world gathered in early April for the Edison Awards in downtown Fort Myers. And at this celebration of innovation and technology, one discussion devoted itself to resiliency in the face of hurricanes.

They could not have picked a better place.

Shortly after the turn of the century in Southwest Florida, sustained winds of 76 to 173 mph devastated swaths of Charlotte County in 2004 from Hurricane Charley. Less than two decades later, in 2022, a 15-foot storm surge submerged Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island in Lee County from Hurricane Ian.

In between, in 2017, Hurricane Irma brought 142 mph winds to the Naples Airport and a 10-foot storm surge to the Ten Thousand Islands of Collier County.

These measurements of science and data, pulled by WINK News meteorologist Zach Maloch, help tell the tale — but they do not explain the toll on humanity. Leaders of companies that develop infrastructure — housing, power, water, sewer, digital connectivity, flood mitigation and more — are working to lessen that toll in the face of what scientists know from data to be a changing climate and rising sea levels.

Constructing buildings that are more durable and higher, especially in coastal and flood-prone areas, will be the new normal.

Private enterprise and publicly funded infrastructure projects already have reshaped the future of Southwest Florida, with many more on the way. Communities both inside and outside the area have proven to be something akin to testing laboratories, with success shared beyond their borders.

Beyond the borders

Longboat Key, a 10-mile-long island and Gulf coastal town of about 7,500 residents near Sarasota, spent $49 million in a deal with Florida Power & Light installing underground power lines. The project began in 2019 and ended in July of last year, just in time for the heart of hurricane season.

Last October, those underground lines straddling Manatee and Sarasota counties got put to the test. They were submerged by 6 to 8 1/2 feet of storm surge from Hurricane Helene.

“A lot of our transformers, the new ones, were underwater,” says Isaac Brownman, who was promoted during the storm’s aftermath from public works director to assistant town manager. “The good news is that the vast majority of them fired back up and didn’t need replacing. That was a testament to the FPL underground systems. The underground system was a much more resilient system, pre- and post-storm.

“It’s much faster than to get up on a pole and restring wires.”

Even if the transformers went out — and many of them did not — it’s still much faster.

“We’re very pleased,” Brownman says.

Coastal areas in Lee County have yet to bury most power lines. But Ryan Oullette, vice president of operations for Wilco Electrical, which contracts with FPL, said change is coming across Florida.

“The paradigm shift from overhead lines to underground is in the midst [of happening],” Oullette says. “It’s already begun.”

But Oullette issued a note of caution: Burying power lines isn’t a cure-all.

“Any catastrophe, such as the size of Hurricane Ian, is going to cause destruction whether the power lines are overhead or underground,” he says. “The fact is a catastrophic 30-year storm, no matter the level of infrastructure — there’s going to be damages incurred during those large storms.”

That said, Oullette is finding the underground lines are more resilient to a weather event.

“Another major pro is the restoration time is cut significantly when they’re underground,” Oullette says. “I’m speaking from a contractor’s perspective. Our restoration times, I believe 95% were restored in the three-week period after the storm. The cost of the investment [is exceeded by], in the long term, the reliability factor and the resiliency. Power losses are less frequent. The system and the equipment last longer. So, the initial investment depreciates less.”

Sanibel not ready for underground

Sanibel Island uses Lee County Electrical Cooperative, or LCEC, as its power provider. LCEC provides power for more than 240,000 customers in the region, but does not have an undergrounding program for entire communities. The cooperative spent about $205 million on replacing damaged infrastructure after Ian. That included replacing power lines both above and below the ground on Sanibel, with a majority of those lines above ground.

LCEC has a different philosophy from FPL when it comes to undergrounding lines.

Denise Vidal, executive vice president and CEO of LCEC, said underground power lines work well for aesthetics, but they do not work so well near water.

“Undergrounding can work well in a wind event,” Vidal says. “Because the lines are underground, they’re going to avoid wind debris falling into them and taking the power out. It doesn’t work well in a flood event. We’re talking about barrier islands and areas that flood really badly. With Ian, underground is not your friend. Electricity and water just do not mix.”

Equipment gets corroded from the salt water in particular, she said.

“On Sanibel, we’re having to go through and replace all of our underground utilities,” Vidal says. “It’s going to take a lot longer to restore it. The city required every restoration service to have a concession to make sure it was safe to reconnect the underground service to their meters. It just takes longer in a flood event to restore and replacements have to occur, because corrosion is eventually going to be a factor.”

Protecting underground power lines in PVC piping doesn’t work as well as it would seem, she said.

“Even if you have PVC, water is going to get in,” Vidal said. “When you have 12 to 15 feet of surge, the water is going to get in. Just underground in general, it’s 12 times more expensive than overhead.”

FPL going underground

Florida Power & Light provides power for more than 680,000 customers in the region. Unlike Lee County Electrical Cooperative, FPL has a program in place to expand undergrounding.

After Hurricane Irma hit in 2017, FPL created a program to expand undergrounding power lines. Six dollars of every customer’s bill goes toward funding the Storm Secure Underground Program. But installing of those lines for the most part takes place away from the coast, unless a town such as Longboat Key approves and funds a project on its own.

“I think it’s really important to talk about the context of undergrounding and how we go about it,” says Shawn Johnson, communication specialist for FPL. “We use a data-driven approach. There won’t be a point where we underground everything. That’s due to a couple of different reasons; we’re undergrounding neighborhoods to make it easier for our crews to access them better.”

Overhead transmission lines, the large structures seen along major highways, will remain above ground because of their size and the heat they generate, Johnson said. Those have been fortified in recent years, with 96% of the transmission lines running along more durable steel and concrete poles and structures instead of wood.

“The second piece of it, we do keep in mind the flood plain and using that as an approach,” Johnson says. “It may not make sense to underground in flood-prone areas. We’ll still strengthen that grid by maybe replacing the older wooden poles.

“Say you have poles about 100 feet apart. We might reduce it to 50 feet. The idea being that you put another pole in the center of it. It’s reducing the distance. If there’s a portion of the line that went down, we can restring that line.”

Proximity to water does, doesn’t deter

The Town of Surfside, just north of Miami Beach and located along the Atlantic Ocean, began the first of a three-phase project to bury its power lines this year. The first phase will cost about $12 million.

Although LCEC and FPL have some of their Southwest Florida power lines buried, neither company has plans to do additional undergrounding in areas prone to storm surge.

They are wise not to do so, said Ted Kury, director of energy studies at Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida. Power lines generate heat, which brings challenges to placing them underground. Add surging stormwater to the mix, and that compounds the challenge, he said.

“In flooding, you’ll see the ground shift,” Kury says. “The underground power lines are typically in a conduit of some sort. There’s a greater chance that it will crack. But the bottom line is: Even power lines under rivers are subject to water incursion and cause problems.

“It’s important to remember that one of the challenges we face in storm hardening is there’s no way to insulate the power lines from interactions with the environment. If power lines were above ground, you don’t have to worry about water incursions, but you have to worry about falling trees and falling debris. If power lines are below ground, now you’ve got to worry about water incursion. Wherever power lines are located, there is going to be some risk. There is no place that you can put power lines that completely insulates them from interactions with the environment. The choice of where you locate your power lines — it’s as simple and as complicated as that.”

Kury works with island countries in the Caribbean, as well as Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, to help them fortify their electrical grids.

“There is no one best solution,” Kury says. “It depends on where you are. It depends on the threats that are most prevalent in your area. Every area is going to be different. Every area is going to have different considerations.”

Sanibel received a $124,000 state grant to conduct a hurricane resiliency study. Further studies to look at undergrounding power lines could be on the table in the future, said Sanibel City Council member Holly Smith, but with the overhead power lines all replaced post-Ian, she said it’s not the most pressing issue the island faces as it continues its recovery.

New times, new government actions

In Cape Coral, the city of more than 200,000 residents created a new position with hurricane resiliency in mind. Former fire chief Ryan Lamb shifted in October to become Emergency Operations Center director. During the previous two years, he had been filling both roles, with assistance from Deputy Fire Chief Michael Russell in firefighting.

“Being a fire chief and emergency management director is two full-time jobs,” Lamb says. “Especially as we’ve seen Irma and Ian, COVID-19, all these disasters that continue to present to our community. It takes full-time effort in emergency management just to continue a focus there.”

The full-time role gives Lamb time to focus on the new projects, he said.

“Here we are, two years afterward, when we have millions of dollars of grants and other projects coming in, where there’s enough work and high-level work.”

An ounce of flood prevention

The leader of a home remodeling company that had bought its new headquarters one year prior watched in dismay as ground flooding from a vicious June 2024 rainstorm seeped through the building, causing thousands of dollars in damage.

Annalisa Xioutas, president and founder of FFI contracting, was dismayed but not deterred. She decided, pretty much then and there, to prevent the next mess by starting a new company. Flood Smart was born one year ago.

“A happy accident,” says Xioutas. “We saw the need, because we experienced it ourselves.”

Flood Smart sells Garrison Hammerhead flood control systems, a brand of aluminum planks and fencing that can withstand up to 6 feet of rising waters.

“We’ll make sure all of their barriers are in place,” Xioutas says. “We’re local, and we’re super dedicated to our area.”

Xioutas isn’t alone in starting a business geared toward flood prevention. Floodproofing.com, founded in 1997, began by selling Smart Vent Engineered Flood Vents, products that can be placed in crawlspaces, enclosures or garages to protect a home’s foundation during a flood. The company expanded in 2018 and has been growing steadily ever since.

Owners of low-lying, existing homes and businesses, such as in historic downtown Fort Myers and Naples, are turning to further advancements in technology to fortify buildings lying in the way of hurricane-induced storm surge.

The need for such fortifications has created business opportunities, as well. Flood Smart and Floodproofing.com are just two companies that offer products designed to mitigate flooding. “It’s not just a Florida problem,” says Tom Little, president and CEO of Floodproofing.com, headquartered in Mount Royal, New Jersey. “It’s a coast-to-coast issue or a worldwide issue. The precipitation levels that we’re getting with these rainfall events, it’s never been seen in history over the past 10 years.”

Last year, Little visited a Naples home fortified with Floodproofing.com products, and could see the success in action in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton.

“We had a project in Naples,” he says. “Right there in the Gordon Drive area. And we call, when our products do their job, we call them saves. Right? They save the building. We’re a goalkeeper. We did our job. Nobody scores. The flood water didn’t win; we won. And so, the saves are important, because it shows. Our products are performance tested in the United States. They’re made in America.”

But there’s one test that will do more for these barriers than any laboratory can, Little says: “There’s no test like Mother Nature.”

Flood Smart began as an offshoot of FFI Contracting Services, founded in 1999. Xioutas bought the company during the Great Recession in 2008. Her original intent was remodeling distressed properties in foreclosure.

“I figured out how to scale it and capitalize on it,” Xioutas says of her first company’s mission in rehabilitating homes. “We were in 30 states.

“After 2015-16, our foreclosures were going away, and the market had stabilized. I went and reinvented, because there was no way the team I had could keep doing just foreclosures. When everyone was doing really poorly, we were killing it. When the pendulum swung the other way, we needed to look at something else. We downsized dramatically and shifted to doing local work. We went to more of a local model and have not looked back since. This has been a wonderful community for us.”

It wasn’t Hurricane Ian in 2022 or Milton and Helene in 2024 that prompted Xioutas to start the new offshoot company. It was the flood event of June 2024.

“We were sitting in a conference room watching the water,” Xioutas says. “The water starts coming in through the walls. We’re like holy you-know-what. Are you kidding me? What do you do at that point? Everyone was in a fire drill, getting everything off the floor. It was a nightmare. And we couldn’t keep the water out. It felt very helpless. You just can’t control anything.

“I can’t raise the building. I’m not going to tear it down. I’m not going to lift it. At this point, I’m not going to sell it. We had just set up our business. I’m not just going to bail. We want people to stay here. I had to find a solution that would work for me first.”

Estero gets proactive on flooding

The Village of Estero began some high-level work in a low-lying area. Last year, the village paid the Lee County School District $15 million for a 72-acre property sandwiched between Interstate 75 and Three Oaks Parkway. It’s surrounded by housing developments that flooded during Hurricane Irma.

Estero is building a 25-acre pond for flood mitigation, with $5 million slated to come from the federal government and $1.7 million coming from the village.

The land had been slated to become 400 to 600 housing units. Instead, it will be used to store and transport excess rain runoff along the Estero River, away from existing homes.

“It is mundane to the community at large,” Estero Village Manager Steve Sarkozy says. “But to those neighbors who experienced the flooding … when you’re looking at a high-density, high-traffic development option versus mitigating flooding in a tight area, it’s a baby step in helping the overall livability of our community.”

Estero is also doing a vulnerability study focusing on the older part of town, near Broadway Avenue, where aging septic tanks outnumber the sewers of the newer, gated communities.

“That’s going to identify where the environmental vulnerabilities are,” says David Willems, Estero’s public works director. “That’s going to look at rainfall flooding, storm surge flooding, wildfires, sea level rise. That’s going to identify where the village is vulnerable.”

From there, Estero would continue to be proactive to mitigate future weather events.

Forging ahead

All area governments should get proactive, not reactive, with future hurricanes in mind, said Natalia Moudrak during a hurricane resiliency discussion at the Edison Awards.

Moudrak is a climate resiliency leader for Aon, a British-American company that advises governments on strategies. She said the onslaught of storm-related damages forces open the door to prepare for future storms.

“In 2024, globally, the natural disasters caused $368 billion in losses,” Moudrak told the audience. “Only 20% of that figure was insured. Hurricane Milton caused $110 billion in damage. What’s more concerning to me is it seems like the trend of costs of damage is not going to go away as a function of time. For the ninth year in a row, that $300 billion mark was exceeded.

“What is driving the losses? It’s not just climate change. There are many other factors: higher volume properties, aging infrastructure, persistent loss of nature that cannot protect communities, lagging adoption of good knowledge.”

That’s the bad news.

“In concert with these losses, there’s a theme that’s emerging,” Moudrak says. “And it’s a theme of hope. And we’ve seen some developers embrace new technologies in new communities.”

Moudrak had one sitting next to her. Syd Kitson, founder of Babcock Ranch, bought 91,000 acres in 2006, then sold 73,000 of them back to Florida for preservation. Kitson is developing the rest to be geared toward resiliency. Not losing power during hurricanes Irma and Ian shows the plan to be working, he said.

“We want this new town to work hand-in-hand with the environment,” Kitson says. “We want to be leaders, not followers. So, we put together a series of initiatives to do it right. The return on our investment was ten-fold.”

Initiatives need to happen, said Carmichael Roberts, fellow panel member and co-founder of Material Impact Fund, which seeks to build transformative technologies that solve real-world problems.

“Forget for a minute about the humanitarian side and doing what’s good for our planet,” Roberts said to the audience. “Even if that wasn’t important — I’m an entrepreneur, and I don’t apologize for that.

“This is save-the-world stuff.”

Lifting homes on Sanibel

Hurricane Ian pushed Sanibel Island to the brink. Unless home and business owners reacted to the hurricane’s aftermath by rebuilding with resilience, Mother Nature always would have other ideas.

The residents of Donax Village, about a mile from the Sanibel Causeway and just south of Periwinkle Way, had just put the finishing retouches on renovating and rebuilding, two years after Hurricane Ian inundated the nine duplexes and two cottages off Donax Street with 5 feet of storm surge waters and muck. And then Hurricane Milton arrived.

Storm surge wrought by Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, 2024, did not breach Donax Village’s homes, which were elevated by 3 feet off the ground level. But it sure came close, said Phillip Hurley, board president of the Donax Village Condominium Association.

“We’re raising all 11 buildings,” Hurley says of a near-unanimous decision among the homeowners. Only one of the 17 property owners did not want to spend between $150,000 and $200,000 per owner to lift their homes by an additional 7 feet.

“It came about, obviously, because we had complete devastation,” Hurley says. “We all did a complete gut and rehab, from roof to sub floor. Water, plumbing, everything had to be replaced.”

Donax Village had just finished those renovations, too.

“A week and a half later is when Milton hit,” Hurley says. “We just escaped flooding again by just inches. It was probably the most somber meeting. We pushed through it and got everything rebuilt. And then we all looked at each other: ‘I can’t believe this is happening again.’ If that were to have happened, it would have been devastating. We don’t know how the community would have stayed together.”

On Sanibel, the local government has a 45-foot height limit and recently approved a 10 feet above-sea-level minimum for the floors of new buildings. New construction will have to adhere to those codes, and existing buildings will be grandfathered into the old codes. But existing buildings will not be immune to storm surge.

Donax Village hired Davie Shoring, a Tickfaw, Louisiana-based and Florida-licensed contractor, to lift the homes. GEM Home Services, founded four years ago in Cape Coral, will assist by disconnecting and reconnecting all utilities, plus building 10 feet worth of stairways for residents to again access their front doors.

“We did a lot of this work before Ian,” says Greg Kerle, a sales manager for Davie Shoring. “Once Ian hit, that’s when everything took off. It changed everybody’s lives down here. At that point, you don’t have much of a choice. Once you get a couple more storms coming in, like Helene and Milton, knocking a house down and rebuilding a house is three times the cost of what we do.”

Davie Shoring, which does work in Florida from Crystal River on south to Key West, begins by digging around the house. Depending on the home’s size, the company will use between 30 and 90 jacks to raise the home.

“We drive brand-new block about every 4 feet under the foundation of the house,” Kerle says. “Once we get all of those in, all the way around the foundation, that’s when we lift the house up. About 4 feet. We put the new columns on the new foundation.

“If somebody has a single-story house and wants to go up 20 feet, we’ll put them up 20 feet. You just have to engineer it that way.”

Joe Jablonski, president of GEM Home Services, has his team do work at the beginning and end of the project.

“They do all the heavy work,” Jablonski says of Davie Shoring. The two companies plan to work together on more projects moving forward. “We disconnect and reconnect. It’s disconnecting the AC units and reconnecting them. You have to drain the system and put new copper in. The electric has to be disconnected. And then LCEC comes in, and our electricians reconnect to the power. When the building gets lifted, we swing over back to the house and reconnect them to the meter. As far as plumbing goes, we have to disconnect the toilets. We put the extensions in to the water lines and reconnect them. It’s a pretty simple process; not a lot can go sideways.”

Just as Ian changed building codes on Sanibel, it also changed Jablonski’s workload. “Work volume has increased probably tenfold,” he says. “We have been working nonstop, six days a week, since Ian.”

Hurley and his neighbors are hoping to have the project done in time for 2025 hurricane season, which officially begins June 1.

“Ours is a pretty slick opportunity for them, because we’re already elevated,” Hurley says of the contractors. “It makes it less extensive and less laborious. It’s going to be a unified lift system that jacks up the home. It’s a very gentle process. They use hydraulics. We don’t have to move anything; we don’t have to take our wine glasses off our shelf.”

In early 2022, about six months before Ian hit, Hurley and three other neighbors bought their Sanibel homes, not knowing what they would be getting into. Most of the homes were built in 1978, so the new owners renovated them, only to have the renovations ruined a few months later.

“We all came together as a community,” Hurley says of Ian’s aftermath. “I think it’s an impressive display of private initiative. The idea is resiliency and sustainability. It’s the future of living on a barrier island. I don’t think there’s going to be any new homes built that aren’t elevated.

“It’s not just an investment. They’re our homes. Yes, we’re trying to protect our investments. But we want to live there. Ultimately, we’re trying to keep Sanibel viable.”