Southwest Florida

Florida's wildfire season is heating up early this year, as blazes surround Southwest Florida.

Some longtime Cape Coral residents fear for the future of the once laid-back community. Development, they say, is ruining the old charm of the cape.

More Puerto Ricans are coming to the mainland U.S. than just a decade ago, and many are settling in Southwest Florida. Here they seek to build a community that always remembers their homeland.

Residents have mixed feeling about the city's exponential growth.

Big companies are snapping up land along the I-75 corridor, bringing a type of boomtown to Charlotte, Lee and Collier counties. Local leaders believe higher-paying jobs are coming to the area, easing the past dependence on tourism to drive the economy.

FEMA representatives told Lee County and four municipalities within it that residents were losing their long-held flood insurance discounts because they didn’t follow the federal agency’s rules on rebuilding after a storm.

The Naples United Church of Christ hosted a youth mental health community forum for local health care players and mental health experts to show their progress toward a more well community.

Southwest Florida is so rich in wildlife habitat and has so many threatened and endangered species that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to add the region to the world’s largest network of protected lands.

"Price of Paradise: Surviving Hurricane Ian," which will be shown at the Sunscreen Film Festival, shows footage from a surge cam that captured the destruction caused by water forced ashore by the storm.

Most forecasters have decided the disturbance developing in the Gulf of Mexico does not have the time, or the mojo, to undergo the rapid and daunting transformation into an early tropical system and ease the drought.

Rainfall totals since the beginning of the year are more than 70 percent below normal.

Inhabited and uninhabited, barrier islands move. They will need fortification to survive predicted increases in sea level rise.