Margaritaville Resort construction prepares for Hurricane Ian

The Margaritaville Resort project is still full speed ahead despite Tropical Storm Ian.

WINK News spoke with the mayor about the project.

Mayor Ray Murphy said he’s fairly confident the storm will not be causing any trouble for this Margaritaville construction. He said contractors are not gonna be taking any chances on the project they’ve been working on for over a year.

Murphy said everything depends on Monday.

The city has battened down big properties like Town Hall, but on Monday if the storm looks like it’s heading this way they’re going to follow the lead of the county and put in every safety measure they can.

The same goes for the Margaritaville construction. If things are looking worse the mayor said contractors are going to take measures to make sure that construction isn’t going anywhere.

“Their structure is up. I mean, they’re there, all the concrete buildings up. So that’s not going anywhere. But so there’s, there’s some scaffolding up that they’d have to be concerned about. And various things on the construction site itself that, that they can send their crews out and police the area. And I have every confidence that there won’t be any problems down there,” Murphy said.

Murphy said he’s not too concerned about any of the structures on Fort Myers Beach because everything here was built to withstand tough storms. He said Fort Myers Beach has one of the toughest building codes in the entire United States.

And just like the mayor, people on Fort Myers Beach were also not concerned about the storm.

Allison Godin, visiting Fort Myers Beach from Ohio said, “I came to surprise my mom for her 71st birthday.”

She said she did know a possible hurricane was coming but she came anyway.

Kayla and her boyfriend made their best attempt at outsmarting the bad weather to come.

“We knew it was coming but on the other side it was already storming so we came to this side,” Kayla said.

They left the east coast to come to Fort Myers Beach.

“Now we’re gonna head back and it’ll be coming to this side,” Kayla said.

But some people who live here at the beach don’t plan to leave.

Murphy said those people don’t need to worry.