43
Former Valley residents continue to ride out Hurricane Irma's fury
FLORIDA
Floridians, including several ex-Mahoning Valley residents , were still dealing with Hurricane Irma or its aftermath Sunday night depending on where they rode the storm out.
In some areas, the damage seemed not to be as horrific as predicted.
“Southwest Florida is still standing,” said Mike Braun, former reporter and page designer for The Vindicator, now a reporter with the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla..
Braun, who has been living at the newspaper for several days, said reporters were not out on the roads Sunday and they were “pretty much covering the storm by phone.”
Braun, who said they won’t see the full extent of the damage until Monday, morning, said it was bad in terms of downed trees and power lines and flooding on the roads.
However, he said he didn’t see many buildings destroyed.
“I think we kind of dodged a bullet. The path Irma took kind of tore her apart once on dry land. It could have been much worse. Hurricane Andrew basically wiped homes off the map,” Braun said.
Andrea Baltes, formerly of Newton Falls, is still hunkered down with her patients in the assisted living facility in Sarasota of which she is executive director.
She said the facility lost power, but a generator kicked in and the “guys are sitting around watching the football game.”
But, Baltes said, “We’re not out of the woods yet, although the hurricane is been downgraded to a Category 2 storm and the eye kind of fizzled out. It is turning inwards as it was approaching Sarasota which was probably a blessing for us, but not so good for Naples.”
Richard and Lois Fenisey, were lifelong Youngstown residents until they moved to Florida in the early 1980s to be able to see their son, Tim Fenisey, play baseball for the University of South Florida where he had a scholarship, said their daughter, Kathy Ruff, also formerly of Youngstown.
Ruff, who has a condo in St. Petersburg Beach, is staying with her parents in Tampa. “It was mandatory to get out of St. Petersburg,” she said.
Her father was a printer at The Vindicator until moving to Florida and was a former president of the Ohio Printers Association.
The Feniseys and Ruff are riding out the storm in a hotel on the USF campus. “Everybody is okay,” Ruff said.
“It is in situations like this that you find out how nice people can be,” she said.