Kevin Ott planned to hang out Hurricane Ian in his Fort Myers home, but ends up on a perilous rescue mission to save his family — and 13 others — from the strongest storm to hit the coast in decades.
Between 2:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday, the 53-year-old captained a friend’s pontoon boat up and down Island Park Road in Fort Myers, rescuing more than just his son’s grandmother, Mary Ann. Dineen, but also more than a dozen others.
Ott told The Daily Beast: “The water was unbelievable. “The water came out very quickly. We scrambled, tried [as] Fast [as] we can come back [Dineen] and it was just—within an hour, half an hour, or less, it was there. And these people are panicking on the rooftops, the people in the second stories, they’re sitting there waving us down.”
Just a few hours earlier, Ott and his family were sure it wouldn’t be so bad.
Ott has called Fort Myers home for over 50 years. And he’s survived many hurricanes, even when the storms are unnamed and there’s only a two-lane road out of town.
He even built a business from boat owners who had “insurance problems,” and his daughter married a family whose restaurant provided food for storm shelters.
At first, everything seemed fine on Wednesday. Ott slammed the shutters at his house and began to wait for the storm after hearing assurances from Dineen that they would be fine.
But the situation turned from manageable to dire in the blink of an eye.
“[Dineen] called me, she started crying,” Ott told The Daily Beast. “She said, ‘The water’s coming up fast, we’ve got water in the house. You must get here! ‘”
About 10 minutes later, another call came in: “Kevin, you have to come here now because we’re at the knees now.”
Ott ran in her truck with her two teenage children and 23-year-old son to Island Park Road, where Dineen, her daughter, and her daughter’s boyfriend were stranded. But he was stopped by rising floodwaters when his own truck began to drift.
The family feared they would be electrocuted by a downed power line.
“A truck went by for a while and I turned around. I said, ‘No, we have to go back, kids. We can’t find her this way. We have to go back to the store. ‘”
Ott grabbed his friend’s pontoon boat and “dropped it in” on Island Park Road, right in front of a high school. As they drove, his son noticed dangers from the front of the boat — including the source of some of the bumps the lifebuoy suffered: cars drifting underwater.
“When we first [got] in, the front of the boat hit [something] and I asked: ‘What is that?’ My son said, “Dad, you just passed a car.”
It was almost 3 p.m. when they entered a hurricane.
“We actually went through the center of the houses,” says Ott. “We went through them and went right through the white fence.”
“We saw a small child, a mother and a father. They were right in the doorway, all the way up to the end with life jackets on them and the kid holding them,” he said. “I like ‘No!’ I said, ‘We have to stop and catch these guys. We cannot just overcome them. ‘ And then we saw another old man… and he was panicking so we jumped in there and grabbed him.”
Wind and rain surrounded the family. Later, Ott received another text message from Dineen, who said they “could probably die there,” he recalls. “And that’s when we pulled up.”
Three family members are floating in a canoe in the middle of the kitchen after escaping from their loft, where the smell of a gas leak begins to smell.
Once the whole family has boarded the ship, the rescue mission doesn’t stop there.
“We stayed there until almost 7 o’clock probably because when we started going to grandma’s house on Island Park someone waved us down,” he said, later adding: “We just couldn’t get through. surname.”
The team weathers wind, rain, and noisy power lines to save an elderly couple with oxygen tanks, and more. They worked together to rescue two cats and two dogs — including Dineen’s golden retriever Bentley.
“I had 15, 16 people, I couldn’t stop. I felt so bad but then when it got dark I couldn’t really see anything,” said Ott, who lamented that he couldn’t help more of the people who waved him off even after he had filled the boat.
“I would have died without you,” one of the survivors later told Ott.
Now, he said, homes are on fire and people are still trapped without electricity, food or fuel. Even Ott’s parents are still in need of aid.
“Back when Irma attacked, they had the same problem with floods. The county thought they fixed it but they didn’t plan on letting this happen to us like this,” Ott said. “The sad thing is that no one can find fuel, no one can find anything.”
Ott said people in his neighborhood were arrested without even knowing it.
“They are suffering, they have nowhere to go. And a lot of people weren’t ready to start because they didn’t think it was going to be bad,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to be bad, not this bad.”
