San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ian toll rises as rescuers search for survivors
FORT MYERS, Fla. — With the death toll rising to nearly three dozen, rescuers searched on Saturday for survivors among the Florida homes decimated by Hurricane Ian, while authorities in South Carolina began assessing damage from the powerful storm’s strike.
Ian, one of the strongest hurricanes ever to hit the U.S., terrorized millions for most of the week, battering western Cuba before churning across Florida from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean, where it mustered a final assault on the Carolinas.
At least 34 people were confirmed dead, including 27 in Florida mostly from drowning but others from the storm’s tragic fallout. An elderly couple died after their oxygen machines shut off when they lost power, authorities said. Four more deaths were reported in North Carolina and three earlier in the week in Cuba.
As of Saturday, more than 1,000 people had been rescued from flooded areas along Florida’s southwestern coast alone, said Daniel Hokanson, a fourstar general and head of the National Guard.
South Carolina’s Pawleys Island, a beach community about 73 miles up the coast from Charleston, was among the places in the state hardest hit by Ian, and power remained knocked out to at least half of the island Saturday.
Eddie Wilder, who has been coming to Pawleys Island for more than six decades, said Friday’s storm was “insane to watch.” He said waves as high as 25 feet washed away the pier just two doors down from his home.
“We watched it hit the pier and saw the pier disappear,” Wilder said. “We watched it crumble and and watched it float by.”
The Pawleys pier was one of at least four along South Carolina’s coast to be destroyed during Ian’s winds and rain. Portions of the pier littered the beach. The intracoastal waterway was strewn
with the remnants of several boat houses knocked off their pilings in the storm.
Traffic was shut off to Pawleys Island’s southernmost point, where crews were working to clear roadways of sand and other debris.
In North Carolina, the storm claimed at least four lives and appeared to have mainly downed trees and power lines, leaving more than 280,000 people across
the state without power Saturday, according to state officials.
Ian made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast last week as an enormous Category 4 event. Authorities and volunteers there were still assessing the damage as shocked residents tried to make sense of what they just lived through.
“I want to sit in the corner and cry. I don’t know what else to do,” Stevie Scuderi said after shuffling
through her mostly destroyed Fort Myers apartment, the mud in her kitchen clinging to her sandals.
Hurricane Ian has likely caused “well over $100 billion’’ in damage, including $63 billion in privately insured losses, according to the disaster modeling firm Karen Clark & Co. If those numbers are borne out, that would make Ian among the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history.