As Hurricane Ian continues to upend the lives of millions along the southeastern United States, authorities in Florida and South Carolina have started sifting through the storm’s wreckage to assess the toll of one of the strongest, most expensive hurricanes in recent American history.
The storm worked its way north after slamming into Florida, gathering some of its strength back from the warm Atlantic Ocean waters, and hit South Carolina on Friday, making landfall in Georgetown, 60 miles north of Charleston, and destroying parts of four popular piers, including two in Myrtle Beach.
Though Charleston was mostly spared from the worst of the storm, the city’s mayor John Tecklenburg told the local Post and Courier its impact on the community was “still significant, with a number of roads closed, residents without power and flooding damage.” It was the third hurricane to make landfall in the state in six years, after Matthew in 2016 and Isaias in 2020 both caused significant damage.
By Saturday morning, an estimated 1.2 million people remained without power in Florida, with hundreds of thousands more in North Carolina and thousands in Virginia, as the storm weakened to a post-tropical cyclone.
Dozens of people, mostly in Florida, have died from drowning and other storm-related causes as it initially ripped through Florida’s coasts earlier this week, flooding streets and houses. Florida officials confirmed that at least 27 people have died so far, though that number is expected to substantially rise as rescue crews search through the wreckage for survivors through the weekend.
In fact, the sheriff’s office of Lee County, Florida, reportedly confirmed the deaths of 35 people from Ian in its jurisdiction as of Saturday, though it wasn’t clear if state officials had also made the same confirmation.
Three people died in western Cuba earlier in the week from the storm.
Aerial footage captured by the National Ocean Service showed once lush areas of Florida’s coastal communities, hit hardest by the storm, now completely ravaged. One resident described to the Tampa Bay Times the decimation of Fort Myers Beach as if “somebody took an atom bomb and dropped it”.
Meanwhile, heavy rains caused neighborhood flooding in more inland areas in central Florida. Officials closed a 14-mile stretch of Interstate 75 in Florida late Friday night because of flooding in the Myakka River.
Residents in some of the most affected coastal communities in Florida questioned why evacuation orders came later than expected despite the storm’s forecast.
The disaster modeling firm Karen Clark & Co estimated that Hurricane Ian could be the fourth costliest hurricane in US history, inflicting substantially more than $100bn in damage, the Associated Press reported.
US president Joe Biden on Saturday issued an emergency declaration in North Carolina for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) “to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering” caused by Hurricane Ian.
Reports /TrainViral/