Large-scale search and rescue efforts are continuing along Florida’s west coast as residents slowly return to confront the sweeping devastation and rising death toll wrought by Hurricane Ian, one of the strongest storms ever to make landfall in the continental United States.
The Florida Medical Examiners Commission said Saturday that the storm had resulted in 24 deaths, but the figure is likely to increase, as search and rescue teams continue to comb through the debris.
For some of the 2 million evacuees, getting back home is a challenge as power outages continue and floodwaters rise. A 14-mile portion of Interstate 75 south of Tampa was shut down on Friday and many sections of the highway remained closed as of Saturday afternoon as a result of flooding from the Myakka River. A compromised levee also forced evacuations in a Sarasota neighborhood.
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On Sanibel Island, Maureen Vath and her husband, Rich, were rescued from the storm as the surge flooded their house. They later took stock of the damage.
“Everything downstairs is destroyed,” Vath said. “My piano was floating. The desks were in the wrong rooms. Our kitchen cutting board was on the floor, all of our papers, all of our files — everything was just a mess.”
Ahead of the hurricane, the predicted storm surge levels hadn’t worried Vath and her husband, who live inland from the beach but near a small canal. They had weathered Hurricane Charley in 2004 — and prepared with a generator in case of power loss.
“We were taught a lesson,” Vath said, noting that she and her husband also lost their two cars due to the storm surge.
The storm is estimated to have caused more than $60 billion in property loss, making it the “second-largest catastrophe loss event on record” after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, according to the Insurance Information Institute, an insurance industry trade group.
More than a million people in Florida remained without power, according to PowerOutage.us, which aggregates power outage data. Officials warned that hazardous debris and electrical wires could be hidden in flooded areas and urged Florida residents to take caution as they set about cleaning up the destruction.
Officials in Lee County — which includes the areas hit hardest by the storm — faced questions about why the county didn’t issue a mandatory evacuation order in its most flood-prone areas until Tuesday morning, leaving many residents insufficient time to leave before the storm hit that afternoon. The county manager and sheriff’s offices didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post.
Top officials in Florida said mandatory evacuation notices were issued later because it was difficult to pinpoint where the storm was going to make landfall — and initial projections showed it striking farther up the coast, near Tampa.
“When we did our briefings 72 hours before the storm on Sunday, the National Hurricane Center had this storm hitting Taylor County in north Florida. Fort Myers and Naples were not even in the cone,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said during a news conference in St. Augustine on Friday. “So it was a situation where those folks at the local level, as that storm started to shift, then they took that data and then they acted appropriately.”
DeSantis said most of the media was in Tampa awaiting the hurricane when the storm hit, not in Fort Myers, and noted that it wasn’t until Tuesday that it was clear there was going to be such a significant storm surge in Lee County.
Across southwest Florida, deliveries of relief supplies were hampered by road closings. With I-75 closed, oil tankers, trucks carrying boats, and cars transporting relief workers were funneled onto one-lane streets, creating hours-long backups just to go a few miles.
Many gas stations are also shuttered as a result of widespread power outages. Some motorists ran out of gas, leading to stalled vehicles. Fire engines and ambulances also struggled to navigate the gridlock.
For the past two nights, Darrien Harris and his wife felt like they lived on an island, as floodwater covered neighborhood streets in the city of North Port. The couple and their four children scratched aching skin covered in ant and mosquito bites.
“We are all tore up,” said Harris, 30, who said swarms of fire ants attack every time he tries to pick up a piece of debris. “Never in a million years did I think it would be this bad.”
On Saturday morning, the couple saw an opportunity to escape their home, and Darrien knew his 70-year-old mother — whose house is still surrounded by floodwater — needed oil for a generator required to operate her breathing machine.
But as the couple and their children drove to find oil, their car ran out of gas, stranding the family in a parking lot under Florida’s blazing sun. They called a friend to bring them gas, but that person was stuck in a chaotic traffic backup after I-75 was closed. Eventually, they managed to secure gas.
Now that the water has receded on their neighborhood, the couple and their children — ages 15, 10, 11 and 7 — plan to sleep in a tent tonight in their front yard. They said it will be far cooler than sleeping indoors without power.
Rich Palmer, 66, also ran out of gas after a trip that usually takes him 20 minutes took nearly two hours. He worried about the impact the chaos on the interstate was going to have on efforts to reach people in need.
“This will just slow the relief effort,” Palmer said. “We have friends who have no power, no water, and everything in their freezer is going bad.”
David Muench’s family has lived on Sanibel since the 1960s and has never seen the kind of storm surge that flooded the barrier island this week.
“We’ve heard about it, we know we were always warned about it, talked about it, but we never saw it,” Muench said. “We never saw it like this, until now.”
He said his family’s three homes all had been damaged, especially his parents’ house, but vowed to return and rebuild the properties soon.
“That’s what my family does. We’re not done,” he said. “This is a big part of living in Florida. This is living on the Gulf Coast. You have to expect that this is the type of event that could take place during your lifetime. And for me, this is the storm of my lifetime.”
Source: The Washington Post.
