Chokoloskee sits at the edge of the Ten Thousand Islands, connected to Everglades City by a causeway built in 1956. The island is built on more than two thousand years of Calusa shell mounds that reach around twenty feet in places, which is the only reason anything survives here at all. The Smallwood Store from 1906 is the landmark.
Irma put eight feet of water at the Smallwood Store and three to five feet across most of the island. This is one of the most exposed inhabited places in Florida, and roofing here works on the assumption that water is coming back.