Kitson’s three-bedroom, three-bath, two-story home was a sitting duck. “That’s when I thought, ‘I need to get back to the house.’”

Still, Kitson second-guessed that decision while performing one last check of his hurricane game plan, as the gathering winds rocked his full-size pickup-“almost like it was on two wheels,” he recalls. You’d think that warning would’ve had Ranch residents scrambling up I-75 and heading for the hills. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play And the storm, a Category 4, was even stronger. The next morning, a TV report confirmed their worst suspicions: “This thing’s headed straight for Babcock Ranch,” a forecaster said. They discussed the rigidity of the community’s more than 2,000 single-family homes, reviewed contingency plans for electricity and water management, and heavily scrutinized neighborhood drainage.

On the night of the 27th, Kitson called his team of contractors, engineers, and employees into a windowless conference room inside the Babcock Ranch visitor’s center. Given that he was the guy who’d planned and developed the community to begin with, the 64-year-old had to act. And now it had his community, an 18,000-acre outcropping of wetland called Babcock Ranch, in its crosshairs. “I mean, the thing just exploded in intensity,” he recalls. As Ian recharged in the warm Gulf waters, Kitson’s breathing shortened all over again. The move pretty much faked out the forecasters and had the National Weather Service scrambling to draft a new cone of uncertainty. It was certain to lose steam spinning across the largest island in the Caribbean.īut then Ian buzzed through Cuba’s tobacco country before hooking eastward toward the Keys.

At that point the Category 3 storm was forecast to make landfall on the Florida panhandle, far from Kitson’s home base on the southwest Gulf Coast. When Hurricane Ian smashed onto Cuba’s southwest coast in the early morning hours of Tuesday, September 27, 2022, Syd Kitson exhaled.

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