Alberto gains strength

Despite all the focus on Tropical Storm Alberto, it will probably seem like just another day during rainy season in the Naples area.

The storm, which is now in the Gulf of Mexico, is expected to bypass Southwest Florida and make landfall today in the northern part of Florida.

Collier County can expect some rainfall over the next 24 hours from the outer bands, but nothing more than the usual for this time of year, weather officials say.

As of 4 p.m. Monday, Collier had only gotten less than an inch of rainfall in the last 24 hours, said Russell Pfost, chief meteorologist for the Miami-South Florida weather forecast office.

"The Naples area still has the possibility of getting rain bands throughout the day on Tuesday," Pfost said Monday. "But the storm is passing the area in the Gulf."

Jim von Rinteln, Collier emergency management coordinator, said Alberto is being monitored but the county doesn't plan on declaring a state of emergency or issuing evacuation orders.

People should be on the lookout for localized flooding in some areas, von Rinteln said.

Alberto did nothing to slow people in the area Monday. Officials with Naples Municipal Airport and Southwest Florida International Airport said all their scheduled flights had come in.

"We have not lost any flights," said Ted Soliday, executive director of the Naples Airport Authority. "Some flights have been 20-30 minutes late because of the weather. But that's the only problem we've had."

People living near the coast didn't seem concerned about the storm.

The Diamond Shores Mobile Home Park in East Naples, which is shutting down in the next month, suffered serious damage from Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

Resident Margaret Deavers-Dupree said she isn't worried about Alberto.

"It doesn't seem like it's coming right at us," Deavers-Dupree said.

That's good because the trailers have been flooding when it rains, she said.

"It would be bad if we got a lot of rain before moving out," she said.

At the Hitching Post senior citizen mobile home community in East Naples, residents said they are not going to be intimidated by this year's storms.

"We come to Florida to be warm, and this is just what we have to put up with," said Frank Eskridge, 78. "Look what's happening in the rest of the world.

"It's not safe anywhere."

Many of the mobile homes situated in the park suffered extensive damage during Hurricane Wilma. Eskridge estimated about 90 percent of the homes have finally been fixed.

George Crandall, 61, said Wilma wreaked havoc on his trailer, tearing apart his carport, his roof and damaging his two trucks. Water also leaked through his ceiling, damaging his floor and all of his furniture.

Still, with Alberto's wind and rain whipping against the home, which still needs some indoor repairs, Crandall, a painting contractor, said he won't let this season's storms scare him.

"Big deal," Crandall said, referring to the approaching Alberto. "There's not much we can do about it.

"Our vehicles are always packed. If we get a Category 2 or higher, I'm leaving."

Although the center of Alberto was far from Collier's shores Monday, the storm imperiled sea turtle nests.

Loggerheads, which are listed as a threatened species, have dug 208 nests on county beaches since May 1, when nesting season began, said Maura Kraus, Collier County's principal environmental specialist. By Monday, a swollen Gulf of Mexico had washed over 14 nests.

Only time will tell whether the embryos inside those water-logged eggs will survive, Kraus said. It takes about 60 days for the eggs to hatch. Their shells are porous. If submerged for too long, the baby turtles drown.

On Keewaydin Island, where turtle nesting is tracked by the environmental group The Conservancy of Southwest Florida, at least two nests have gotten flooded, said Conservancy biologist David Addison. A full moon exacerbated the storm-whipped seas, raising the water level by several more inches, he said.

But biology might work in the turtles' favor. The tropical storm comes early in the eggs' incubation, when the embryos' oxygen demand is considerably lower, Addison noted.

Last year, a series of close calls with Hurricane Dennis and other early summer storms led to a record-low number of sea turtles nests on Collier beaches. Four hundred and forty four appeared, down 206 from 2004.

Tropical Storm Alberto shouldn't hurt the county's recent $23 million investment in its beaches, said Ron Pennington, chairman of the county's coastal advisory committee. Between February and late May, a county contractor added nearly 700,000 cubic yards of sand to eight miles of shore between Vanderbilt Beach and 22nd Avenue South in Naples.

"Everything was looking fine over there," said Pennington, who informally surveyed the beach Sunday. "(The storm) is going around us and I'm always relieved when that happens."

Staff writers Jeremy Cox and Jennifer Brannock contributed to this report.