By January 2022, Kimberleys Reef was ready to become a reality in the Gulf of Mexico.

The FGCU Reef team had the permit and location from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The cement culverts were stacked and ready at the Oldcast Oldcastle Infrastructure yard in Cape Coral.

And Dr. Mike Parsons had a new design for the 11 acre reef complex.

These 18 culverts will basically be deployed in units of three, so they'll be six units of three and we call them villages just to come up with some kind of catchy name.

Previous research found that the fish tend to separate one village from another.

If you spread them out far enough, which means that each village can harbor more fish.

If it was just one city, if you will, there would actually be fewer fish on those 18 culverts than if you separated them out into six different units.

Parsons said the design allowed for more rigorous research where one village could be used as a control group, while another village with similar parameters could be used for testing.

This design required precision in placement under the water.

So how do you get 20,000 lb.

cement culverts from the Cape Coral cement yard to the Gulf of Mexico?

Enter a family owned barge company on Fort Myers Beach.

Kelly Brothers is a marine construction company that was founded over 40 years ago by my father, Danny Kelly.

And we are in the marine side of construction.

So therefore, anything from marinas, bridges, artificial reefs, water control structures, anything on or around the water that's construction related.

So we kind of learned from the ground up starting in the field and working our way up to learn how to run the cranes, the push boats, the things you see here.

And since the day we were born, it's been a family owned and operated business.

Dane and Travis, who now run the business, are big believers in ensuring the marine habitat in the Gulf stays healthy and fishy.

In a perfect world, we win the lottery and we can go fishing and spearfishing every day.

So to be in construction, any construction I want to be is this type being around the water.

So when artificial reef programs come up or something to do with our waterways, we try to be involved as possible.

In addition to the requisite enthusiasm, Kelly Brothers had the barge and skilled scuba divers to place the culverts underwater.

The plan was to deploy them in the fall of 2022.

The center of hurricane is expected to move onshore in Florida's Gulf Coast in a matter of hours.

Hurricane Ian kicked our butts this beach yard went under 12 to 14 feet of water.

There was a shrimp boat was sitting right here where it floated up.

So we would be about ten feet underwater where we're at right now.

And some of our barges were pushed up, even though they were spudded down.

We're pushed up on this bulkhead.

Half of Fort Myers Beach and some of their debris we had all through here.

Not only did they lose some equipment, but what equipment they had was now pulled into service for recovery efforts up and down the coast.

We were able to land some work of helping put in some of the bulkheads over at the Sanibel Causeway and pipe piles for some of the barges that they're going to be bringing in for some of the bigger companies that were working with FDOT so were helping Lee County locally.

After that, we were working with different marinas in a Estero Bay.

Even if Kelly Brothers hadn't sustained damage, the Gulf of Mexico was not a safe place to be.

Some FGCU scientists and students went out on a research vessel after the storm to check on some of their monitored sites.

And what we saw was a lot like a bomb had gone off down there.

You could see that there were signs of a huge physical disturbance.

Some sites where the rock had been exposed and covered in life were now buried in sand and looked like a barren desert, whereas other sites had been scoured down to the seafloor and limestone was exposed where it had been covered in sand before.

Viz was terrible.

In fact, it was it was kind of scary diving, especially the first site that we drove, which was pretty near the Caloosahatchee and was it was so murky I could hardly see my hand in front of my face.

And the sea was quite rough then it was a cold front after the storm.

On the south side of Estero Bay, Dr. Parsons was assessing the damage to FGCUs Vester Marine and Environmental Science Research Field Station.

Really, the damage that we're seeing was all about storm surge.

We see very little wind damage.

The first thing is just sorting through what we can keep and what needs to be thrown away and then just rebuild and see what can we do better.

So it'll take a while to get everything up and running.

Naturally, the deployment for Kimberly's reef would have to wait, but the clock was ticking.

The Corps of Engineers permit was only good through the fall of 2023.

Major support for Kimberly's Reef is provided by Bodil and George Gellman, who believe the human spirit is behind every scientific discovery.