Searchers hunt for victims amid swath of destruction
Emergency crews and search teams deployed across the Ian-battered flood zones of Southwest Florida on Thursday, hunting for survivors and the missing while only beginning to measure the massive scope of destruction wrought the day before by one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to hit the United States.
More than 2.5 million Floridians remained without power in a region where a three-pronged punch of storm surge, fearsome winds and downpours inundated roads, flipped boats, unmoored houses from their foundations and destroyed at least two bridges to barrier islands.
Yet even as the Gulf Coast emerged from more than a day of harrowing weather, Ian made clear it was not yet finished. Early Thursday, weakened to a tropical storm, it dumped record-setting rain on what officials predicted would be a deadly and costly path across the peninsula. Then it moved offshore into the Atlantic, where it strengthened again into a hurricane. It is expected to slam into South Carolina today.
Flooding across a wide swath of Florida’s hard-hit coastal counties made rescue missions slow and challenging, officials said, offering widely varying estimates of a death toll. Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno said early Thursday that “hundreds” may have lost their lives to the wrath of Hurricane Ian, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm. Later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said two people had been confirmed dead, and it was not yet clear whether the storm was to blame. President Joe Biden, who declared the state a major disaster area, warned of “substantial loss of life.”
The U.S. Coast Guard and Urban Search and Rescue Teams, joined by 28 large helicopters, were performing “active rescue missions,” particularly near the barrier islands that surround Florida’s southwestern coast, DeSantis said. Whatever the casualties, he said, Ian’s damage appeared “historic” and its legacy immense.
“You’re looking at a storm that’s changed the character of a significant part of our state,” DeSantis said Thursday morning in Tallahassee. “This is going to require not just the emergency response now, and the days or weeks ahead, I mean, this is going to require years of effort, to be able to rebuild, to come back.”
By midafternoon Thursday, more than 500 people had been rescued in Charlotte and Lee counties since operations began in the morning, the Florida Division of Emergency Management said.
Residents who witnessed the hurricane’s fury and its aftermath described terrifying scenes.
Bill D’Antuono, a charter boat captain, was at his aunt and uncle’s canal-front house in Naples Park when the water, he said, started rising “real fast.” Ten minutes later, a foot of water had surged into the house. Eventually, it rose above the kitchen countertops. The three fled to the second floor.
On Thursday, the lifelong Naples resident emerged into a transformed city, with boats in roadways, streets underwater and homes filled with water. The landmark Naples Pier was torn apart in some sections. D’Antuono, 36, said his house in the Bayshore area appeared flooded beyond repair.
“Everything we knew is different now,” he said.
D’Antuono was in an evacuation zone but didn’t leave, in part because an earlier predicted track for Ian had the storm headed to Tampa, significantly north of his home. His family had emerged unscathed from many storms and scares in the past, he said. But Ian was not like those other times.
“This is unbelievable,” he said. “I mean it’s just — it’s truly a nightmare. It’s something that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And it just happened to every single person I know.”
Far from the bludgeoned southwest coast, Ian was still making its mark, unloading 10 to 20 inches of rain across a wide belt of Florida. Orlando, in central Florida, set a 24-hour rainfall record with 12.49 inches through 8 a.m. — roughly twice its monthly average. Overnight Wednesday, nearly 17 inches of rain fell near the city, where the storm had forced Walt Disney World to shutter. (The theme park was set to reopen today.)
On the Atlantic coast, 28 inches fell in New Smyrna Beach. In St. Augustine, about 30 miles south of Jacksonville, storm surge caused the Matanzas River to overflow, flooding downtown streets. The National Hurricane Center projected a peak surge of up to 4 to 6 feet in the area.
Multiple rivers were at or headed toward record levels. Because the ground was already saturated from rain, Ian’s downpours had an even greater effect, said Rick Davis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Tampa Bay office.
“The weather is improving for the beaches, but the weather for the people that live by the rivers, they’re going to be impacted for weeks to come with high water,” Davis said.
That was sinking in Thursday for Raj Sukhraj, who had been rescued in the morning with her dog from their home near a lake in West Orlando.
“I never thought it would be this bad,” said Sukhraj, 61, a former schoolteacher who has lived in her house for 10 years. “We went through Hurricane Irma, and it wasn’t anything like this. If I had known, I would have gotten out before it came.”
Sukhraj said she woke up in the middle of the night as Hurricane Ian, by then a Category 1 storm, passed over, and when she put her feet on the floor, the water in her bedroom covered her foot.
“And then it came up to here,” she said, using her cane to measure water that rose up to her shins. “I looked out the window and saw the rescuers across the street, so I opened the window and started yelling and knocking, and they came and got me and my baby.”