Photo composites by The Daily Beast, Courtesy of Kevin Ott
Kevin Ott had planned to ride out Hurricane Ian in his Fort Myers home, but ended up on a dangerous rescue mission to save his family—and 13 others—from the strongest storm to slam the coast in decades.
Between roughly 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 not only his own children’s grandmother, Mary Ann Dineen, but over a dozen more.
“The water, that was unbelievable,” Ott told The Daily Beast. “That water came on so quick. We were scrambling, trying [as] fast [as] we can to get back to [Dineen] and it was just—within an hour, half an hour, or less, it was there. And these people were freaking out on top of the roofs, the people who were in the second stories, they were sitting there waving us down.”
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