Boca Grande and Hurricanes: Hurricane Donna, September 1960

Pansy recalls that “in 1960 they started naming hurricanes, and that’s when Donna came through. Tommy and I and Lonnie Beth, my daughter, and I had some nieces with me, we all stayed in the apartment. We all went upstairs with the idea that if there was going to be water that we would be up and out of the water. Well, we were out of the water, but take my word for it, you don’t want to be up high with nothing but windows all the way around you and you’re looking out at everything flying through the air. Because you don’t know if something’s going to come flying in with you. Hurricane Donna was a really bad storm.”

Betsy Joiner tells her Donna story. “I remember about Hurricane Donna that a lot of people, because they tried to evacuate the island, and the bridge was pretty new then and most of us had to leave. I know that my father stayed on the island until the very end, and we had a little Volvo and Mom and my grandmother, and my brother had all gone and stayed in Venice. Dad talked about driving – it was one in the morning, and he was in the Volvo.  He hardly made it. And then when we got ready to come back, we couldn’t come back to the island unless you walked a plank on the second bridge because it got washed out and you had to walk the plank to get back. The power was out for quite a few days and pine trees were everywhere.”

Pansy adds, “No electricity.  We just went back into the early days.”

And Margaret tells, “A lot of people had rainwater tanks at that time too.  And so that was one way of getting water.”

At this point the recording tape ran out on the History Byte but some other sources on Donna confirm the strength of the storm. A 2017 Boca Beacon article reports – “Sea walls were destroyed such as the one at Journey’s End. Many people sheltered in the old Boca Grande Hotel, but it was almost completely destroyed by her wrath. Trees were torn out by the roots; several homes were devastated. It was the strongest storm to hit Florida until Andrew in 1992.” The Fort Myers New Press reported that on Sunday, September 18, it used a helicopter to deliver the first newspapers to Boca Grande since the onset of Donna.