SANIBEL, Fla. (WINK) \u2014 Antoinette Lodico-Spano may be small in stature, but she has a big heart and isn’t afraid to get dirty.<\/p>\n
She has worked at Sundial Beach Resort and Spa on Sanibel for nearly a decade. She considers it home and the people here family.<\/p>\n
Her family took a tough hit Sept. 28, 2022.<\/p>\n
“Coming to the islands, and it was just devastatingly, like heart crushing that okay, well, we’ll be able to get this back, you know. And obviously, you know, you pull together, or we say we’re Team sundial strong,” Lodico-Spano said.<\/p>\n
She and her coworkers arrived by boat daily, carrying the tools they needed to clean up and rebuild. The place she knew was almost unrecognizable.<\/p>\n
“I think half of us probably did start to cry. We were just kind of all quiet, waiting to walk over and see. And it was just the damage. And the destruction was awful,” Lodico-Spano said.<\/p>\n
Debris was everywhere. Pieces of the resort had been ripped apart by the storm.<\/p>\n
“We welded all of these structures throughout the whole thing,” Lodico-Spano said.<\/p>\n
“Me and one of the other girls just got down and dirty. All of our weight behind it. And we did just as good, I think, as the guys,” she said.<\/p>\n
The storm took away a lot. But for Lodico-Spano, it also created opportunities.<\/p>\n
She traveled to other properties owned by her employer, gaining valuable experience. When she returned, she earned a promotion.<\/p>\n
“For me, I’ve been truly blessed by this company,” Lodico-Spano said.<\/p>\n
She calls it resilience. The kind that comes from having to build back, one piece at a time.<\/p>\n
“You just keep going and one day at a time, and keep working forward,” Lodico-Spano said.<\/p>\n
That may be the part of Hurricane Ian’s story that is easiest to miss. The storm was over in hours.<\/p>\n
The recovery will go on for years. For many on the islands, it is still a work in progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SANIBEL, Fla. (WINK) \u2014 Antoinette Lodico-Spano may be small in stature, but she has a big heart and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":411500,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,28,6027,27368,15471,163220],"class_list":["post-411499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-florida","tag-hurricane-ian","tag-hurricane-relief","tag-sanibel","tag-sundial-beach-resort"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411499\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}