Florida

Couple Leaves Keys For Good After New Home Totaled By Irma

As worst-case scenarios go, this one is hard to beat.

Ron St. Clair and Diane Holts are a married couple. Two weeks before Hurricane Irma’s eye passed over Ramrod Key, they moved into a new home. They took pictures and shot video of their property, mindful that a monster storm was approaching.

The images show a lovely setting on the waterfront, a typical, Florida Keys house built on stilts to protect against storm surge. The couple heeded the warnings and evacuated, hoping their house would survive. They made it back home to see Irma’s aftermath yesterday, and once again, Diane broke out her video camera.

“Our lovely back patio, not so lovely anymore,” Holts says on her video, as she pans the destruction.

There’s debris everywhere, pieces of roof and walls and power lines, all of it representing their hopes and dreams, in ruins.

The storm surge left marks on the ground floor about five feet up, and mud everywhere inside. Irma used her wrecking ball on the second floor. It’s splintered.

“Obviously, we lost our home, so now we’re basically homeless,” St. Clair explained.

“Yeah, I’m really sad over everything we lost but I got my husband and I have my dog and we rebuild, that’s it, there’s nothing else we can do, cry a little bit and regroup,” Holts said.

We caught up with the couple at the Snapper Creek rest stop on the Florida Turnpike. After 20 years of Keys living, Ron and Diane are moving back to New Jersey. They salvaged whatever they could from the wreckage. Now all of their belongings fit in the back of their pickup truck.

“Hardly anything we could have salvaged,” St. Clair said. “You just don’t realize, imagine being in that situation where, what do I take, what do I leave behind, and it’s very hard.”

So Irma completely uprooted their lives, but there’s an important fact to consider: Diane says if they hadn’t evacuated, they wouldn’t have lives to rebuild.

“I didn’t evacuate for Wilma, I was sorry, I did evacuate for Irma, when they tell you to go, go, if we had stayed we’d be dead,” Holts said.

For this couple, the road goes one way.

“Move forward or curl up in a ball and die, and that’s not even an option, so move forward it is, we have our moments when we cry, squeeze the heck out of our dog,” Holts said. “It’s one day at a time for us, we can’t think long term yet.”

One day, maybe they’ll move back to the Keys, but right now, it’s all about putting distance between them and Irma.

Contact Us