Breezy in the face of disaster
Nathan Hill on the precarities of Fort Myers Beach
The town of Fort Myers Beach sits on the northern tip of a small barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. There’s only one main road going through town, and on the upper end of that road is the island’s most recent — and most flamboyant — newcomer: the Margaritaville Resort, a 254-room, $200-million pastel extravaganza that’s a little incongruous amidst the town’s otherwise laid-back, old-Florida, low-rise ambiance.
You know Margaritaville, right? It’s the brand inspired by that one Jimmy Buffet song that’s now grown into a whole empire of hotels and resorts and airport restaurants and cruises and RV parks and Pickleball courts and all manner of lifestyle merch with a palm-tree’d, ‘it’s-five-o’clock-somewhere,’ ‘different-latitude/different-attitude’ coastal vibe. This new resort opened in December of last year. If you want to see it, just search YouTube for ‘Margaritaville Fort Myers’ and you’ll find a webcam that offers a live view of the beachfront pool and bar (where they make drinks with appropriately punny names: ‘Last Mango In Paris,’ ‘Tropical Pear-a-dise,’ etc.), as well as the Lah De Dah Grill, a mass-market facsimile of one of those small, rustic, no-frills local seafood joints. For the real thing, go basically anywhere else in town; it is one of those weird postmodern ironies that Margaritaville Fort Myers simulates the experience of a tropical island while also being located on an actual tropical island.
It was perhaps a bad omen that Hurricane Ian struck Fort Myers Beach while Margaritaville was still under construction, adding $20 million to its costs while catastrophically damaging or destroying almost every other structure on the island. Then Hurricane Helene hit last September — less than a year after Margaritaville’s grand opening — dumping two million pounds of sand into its sparkling new pool. The resort proudly announced, a month later, that the sand was gone, the clean-up was finished. And just one day later, Hurricane Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico, eventually coming ashore and, once again, totally swamping Margaritaville.
If you were out here, in the days after Milton, you might have heard — beneath the din of Margaritaville’s piped-in island music — the ceaseless small roar of gasoline generators still in use, along with the occasional distant popping sound of electrical transformers exploding, either from being inundated by saltwater, or from being overtaxed by a failing grid, or both. Cars were snarled at the nearby intersection where the traffic signal still wasn’t working after the flood. There was a boil water notice still in place. Big trucks were delivering sand to an eroded beach. People piled their damaged debris in their front yards, to be taken away whenever the city could get to it.
You can watch videos of this most recent flood, also on YouTube. It is another of those weird ironies that the Margaritaville webcam, which was almost certainly intended to show northern folks the idyllic South Florida winter, is now perversely used by many locals — myself included — during hurricanes to understand how bad the flooding is going to be.
And lately it’s been pretty bad. The water in the Gulf of Mexico is hotter than it’s ever been on record. Sea level rise has increased along the Gulf Coast faster than almost anywhere else on the planet. We’ve had three historic floods in just two years. And yet, coastal development continues relentlessly. Four large parcels in Fort Myers Beach have been recently sold to developers, whose projects could rival Margaritaville in scale. And it’s the same story all over the state. A recent study of 410 Florida municipalities found no relationship between how vulnerable a city is to climate change-related flooding and how much they’re prioritising climate change adaptation. Another study surveyed local policymakers about the barriers to such investments, and half named their own constituency — voters just aren’t that concerned.
And nothing embodies this nonchalance better, I think, than Margaritaville Fort Myers Beach: a $200 million resort built on the most precarious place imaginable whose motto is basically ‘Forget about it and relax.’ Standard rooms are $300 per night. The fish tacos are twenty bucks. As of last October, you can buy a specialised Margaritaville license plate from the state of Florida, proceeds of which go to — among other things — hurricane relief.
Nathan Hill’s latest novel, Wellness, was published by Picador in September 2024