EVACUATION SHOULD BE A PUBLIC SERVICE
Facing a Dire Storm Forecast in Florida, Officials Delayed Evacuation
NOT JUST A PSA
Frances Robles
Sat, October 1, 2022
Tristan Stout surveys damage to his father's boat after it was thrown across the street as Hurricane Ian swept over San Carlos Island in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022. (Jason Andrew/The New York Times)
FORT MYERS, Fla. — As Hurricane Ian charged toward the western coast of Florida this week, the warnings from forecasters were growing more urgent. Life-threatening storm surge threatened to deluge the region from Tampa all the way to Fort Myers.
But while officials along much of that coastline responded with orders to evacuate Monday, emergency managers in Lee County held off, pondering during the day whether to tell people to flee, but then deciding to see how the forecast evolved overnight.
The delay, an apparent violation of the meticulous evacuation strategy the county had crafted for just such an emergency, may have contributed to catastrophic consequences that are still coming into focus as the death toll continues to climb.
Dozens have died overall in the state, officials said, as Ian, downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, moved through North Carolina and Virginia on Saturday, at one point leaving nearly 400,000 electricity customers in those states without power.
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About 35 of Florida’s storm-related deaths have been identified in Lee County, the highest toll anywhere in the state, as survivors describe the sudden surge of water — predicted as a possibility by the National Hurricane Service in the days before the storm hit — that sent some of them scrambling for safety in attics and on rooftops.
Lee County, which includes the hard-hit seaside community of Fort Myers Beach, as well as the towns of Fort Myers, Sanibel and Cape Coral, did not issue a mandatory evacuation order for the areas likely to be hardest hit until Tuesday morning, a day after several neighboring counties had ordered their most vulnerable residents to flee.
By then, some residents recalled that they had little time to evacuate. Dana Ferguson, 33, a medical assistant in Fort Myers, said she had been at work when the first text message appeared on her phone Tuesday morning. By the time she arrived home, it was too late to find anywhere to go, so she hunkered down with her husband and three children to wait as a wall of water began surging through areas of Fort Myers, including some that were well away from the coastline.
“I felt there wasn’t enough time,” she said.
Ferguson said she and her family fled to the second floor, lugging a generator and dry food, as the water rose through their living room. The 6-year-old was in tears.
Kevin Ruane, a Lee County commissioner and a former mayor of Sanibel, said the county had postponed ordering an extensive evacuation because the earlier hurricane modeling had shown the storm heading farther north.
“I think we responded as quickly as we humanly could have,” he said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and his state emergency management director also said the earlier forecasts had predicted the brunt of the storm’s fury would strike farther north.
“There is a difference between a storm that’s going to hit north Florida that will have peripheral effects on your region, versus one that’s making a direct impact,” DeSantis said at a news conference Friday in Lee County. “And so what I saw in southwest Florida is, as the data changed, they sprung into action.”
But while the track of Hurricane Ian did shift closer to Lee County in the days before it made landfall, the surge risks the county faced — even with the more northerly track — were becoming apparent as early as Sunday night.
At that point, the National Hurricane Center produced modeling showing a chance of a storm surge covering much of Cape Coral and Fort Myers. Parts of Fort Myers Beach, even in that case, had a 40% chance of a 6-foot-high storm surge, according to the surge forecasts.
Lee County’s emergency planning documents had set out a time-is-of-the-essence strategy, noting that the region’s large population and limited road system make it difficult to evacuate the county swiftly. Over years of work, the county has created a phased approach that expands the scope of evacuations in proportion to the certainty of risk. “Severe events may require decisions with little solid information,” the documents say.
The county’s plan proposes an initial evacuation if there is even a 10% chance that a storm surge will go 6 feet above ground level; based on a sliding scale, the plan also calls for an evacuation if there is a 60% chance of a 3-foot storm surge.
Along with the forecasts Sunday night, updated forecasts Monday warned that many areas of Cape Coral and Fort Myers had between a 10% and a 40% chance of a storm surge above 6 feet, with some areas possibly seeing a surge of more than 9 feet.
Over those Monday hours, neighboring Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties issued evacuation orders, while Sarasota County announced that it expected evacuation orders to be in effect for the following morning. In Lee County, however, officials said they were waiting to make a more up-to-date assessment the following morning.
“Once we have a better grasp on all of that dynamic, we will have a better understanding about what areas we may call for evacuation, and, at the same time, a determination of what shelters will be open,” the Lee County manager, Roger Desjarlais, said Monday afternoon.
But forecasters with the National Hurricane Center were growing more explicit in their warnings for the region. In a 5 p.m. update Monday, they wrote that the highest risk for “life-threatening storm surge” was in the area from Fort Myers to Tampa Bay.
“Residents in these areas should listen to advice given by local officials,” the hurricane center wrote. New modeling showed that some areas along Fort Myers Beach were more likely than not to see a 6-foot surge.
Ruane, the county commissioner, said that one challenge the county faced was that the local schools had been designed to be shelters and that the school board had made the decision to keep them open Monday.
By 7 a.m. Tuesday, Desjarlais announced a partial evacuation order but emphasized that “the areas being evacuated are small” compared with a previous hurricane evacuation.
The county held off on further evacuations, despite a forecast that showed potential surge into areas not covered by the order. Officials expanded their evacuation order later in the morning.
By the middle of the afternoon, Lee County officials were more urgent in their recommendation: “The time to evacuate is now, and the window is closing,” they wrote in a message on Facebook.
Katherine Morong, 32, said she had been prepared earlier in the week to hunker down and ride out the storm based on the guidance from local officials. The sudden evacuation order Tuesday morning left her scrambling, she said, as she set out in her car in the rain.
“The county could have been more proactive and could have given us more time to evacuate,” she said. On the road toward the east side of the state, she said, she was driving through torrents of rain, with tornadoes nearby.
Joe Brosseau, 65, said he did not receive any evacuation notice. As the storm surge began pouring in Wednesday morning, he said, he considered evacuating but realized it was too late.
He climbed up a ladder with his 70-year-old wife and dog to reach a crawl space in his garage. He brought tools in case he needed to break through the roof to escape.
“It was terrifying,” Brosseau said. “It was the absolute scariest thing. Trying to get that dog and my wife up a ladder to the crawl space. And then to spend six hours there.”
Some residents said they had seen the forecasts but decided to remain at home anyway — veterans of many past storms with dire predictions that had not come to pass.
“People were made aware, they were told about the dangers and some people just made the decision that they did not want to leave,” DeSantis said Friday.
Joe Santini, a retired physician assistant, said he would not have fled his home even if there had been an evacuation order issued well before the storm. He said that he had lived in the Fort Myers area most of his life, and that he would not know where else to go.
“I’ve stuck around for every other one,” he said.
The water rushed into his home around dusk Wednesday night, and Friday, there was still a high-water mark about a foot above the floor — leaving Santini a little stunned. “I don’t think it’s ever surged as high as it did,” he said.
Lee County is now an epicenter of devastation, with mass destruction at Fort Myers Beach, the partial collapse of the Sanibel Causeway and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. With water mains broken, the county utilities agency has advised residents to boil their water.
President Joe Biden said Friday that the destruction from the storm was likely to be among the worst in U.S. history.
“It’s going to take months, years to rebuild,” he said.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
Frances Robles
Sat, October 1, 2022
Tristan Stout surveys damage to his father's boat after it was thrown across the street as Hurricane Ian swept over San Carlos Island in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022. (Jason Andrew/The New York Times)
FORT MYERS, Fla. — As Hurricane Ian charged toward the western coast of Florida this week, the warnings from forecasters were growing more urgent. Life-threatening storm surge threatened to deluge the region from Tampa all the way to Fort Myers.
But while officials along much of that coastline responded with orders to evacuate Monday, emergency managers in Lee County held off, pondering during the day whether to tell people to flee, but then deciding to see how the forecast evolved overnight.
The delay, an apparent violation of the meticulous evacuation strategy the county had crafted for just such an emergency, may have contributed to catastrophic consequences that are still coming into focus as the death toll continues to climb.
Dozens have died overall in the state, officials said, as Ian, downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, moved through North Carolina and Virginia on Saturday, at one point leaving nearly 400,000 electricity customers in those states without power.
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times
About 35 of Florida’s storm-related deaths have been identified in Lee County, the highest toll anywhere in the state, as survivors describe the sudden surge of water — predicted as a possibility by the National Hurricane Service in the days before the storm hit — that sent some of them scrambling for safety in attics and on rooftops.
Lee County, which includes the hard-hit seaside community of Fort Myers Beach, as well as the towns of Fort Myers, Sanibel and Cape Coral, did not issue a mandatory evacuation order for the areas likely to be hardest hit until Tuesday morning, a day after several neighboring counties had ordered their most vulnerable residents to flee.
By then, some residents recalled that they had little time to evacuate. Dana Ferguson, 33, a medical assistant in Fort Myers, said she had been at work when the first text message appeared on her phone Tuesday morning. By the time she arrived home, it was too late to find anywhere to go, so she hunkered down with her husband and three children to wait as a wall of water began surging through areas of Fort Myers, including some that were well away from the coastline.
“I felt there wasn’t enough time,” she said.
Ferguson said she and her family fled to the second floor, lugging a generator and dry food, as the water rose through their living room. The 6-year-old was in tears.
Kevin Ruane, a Lee County commissioner and a former mayor of Sanibel, said the county had postponed ordering an extensive evacuation because the earlier hurricane modeling had shown the storm heading farther north.
“I think we responded as quickly as we humanly could have,” he said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and his state emergency management director also said the earlier forecasts had predicted the brunt of the storm’s fury would strike farther north.
“There is a difference between a storm that’s going to hit north Florida that will have peripheral effects on your region, versus one that’s making a direct impact,” DeSantis said at a news conference Friday in Lee County. “And so what I saw in southwest Florida is, as the data changed, they sprung into action.”
But while the track of Hurricane Ian did shift closer to Lee County in the days before it made landfall, the surge risks the county faced — even with the more northerly track — were becoming apparent as early as Sunday night.
At that point, the National Hurricane Center produced modeling showing a chance of a storm surge covering much of Cape Coral and Fort Myers. Parts of Fort Myers Beach, even in that case, had a 40% chance of a 6-foot-high storm surge, according to the surge forecasts.
Lee County’s emergency planning documents had set out a time-is-of-the-essence strategy, noting that the region’s large population and limited road system make it difficult to evacuate the county swiftly. Over years of work, the county has created a phased approach that expands the scope of evacuations in proportion to the certainty of risk. “Severe events may require decisions with little solid information,” the documents say.
The county’s plan proposes an initial evacuation if there is even a 10% chance that a storm surge will go 6 feet above ground level; based on a sliding scale, the plan also calls for an evacuation if there is a 60% chance of a 3-foot storm surge.
Along with the forecasts Sunday night, updated forecasts Monday warned that many areas of Cape Coral and Fort Myers had between a 10% and a 40% chance of a storm surge above 6 feet, with some areas possibly seeing a surge of more than 9 feet.
Over those Monday hours, neighboring Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee, Sarasota and Charlotte counties issued evacuation orders, while Sarasota County announced that it expected evacuation orders to be in effect for the following morning. In Lee County, however, officials said they were waiting to make a more up-to-date assessment the following morning.
“Once we have a better grasp on all of that dynamic, we will have a better understanding about what areas we may call for evacuation, and, at the same time, a determination of what shelters will be open,” the Lee County manager, Roger Desjarlais, said Monday afternoon.
But forecasters with the National Hurricane Center were growing more explicit in their warnings for the region. In a 5 p.m. update Monday, they wrote that the highest risk for “life-threatening storm surge” was in the area from Fort Myers to Tampa Bay.
“Residents in these areas should listen to advice given by local officials,” the hurricane center wrote. New modeling showed that some areas along Fort Myers Beach were more likely than not to see a 6-foot surge.
Ruane, the county commissioner, said that one challenge the county faced was that the local schools had been designed to be shelters and that the school board had made the decision to keep them open Monday.
By 7 a.m. Tuesday, Desjarlais announced a partial evacuation order but emphasized that “the areas being evacuated are small” compared with a previous hurricane evacuation.
The county held off on further evacuations, despite a forecast that showed potential surge into areas not covered by the order. Officials expanded their evacuation order later in the morning.
By the middle of the afternoon, Lee County officials were more urgent in their recommendation: “The time to evacuate is now, and the window is closing,” they wrote in a message on Facebook.
Katherine Morong, 32, said she had been prepared earlier in the week to hunker down and ride out the storm based on the guidance from local officials. The sudden evacuation order Tuesday morning left her scrambling, she said, as she set out in her car in the rain.
“The county could have been more proactive and could have given us more time to evacuate,” she said. On the road toward the east side of the state, she said, she was driving through torrents of rain, with tornadoes nearby.
Joe Brosseau, 65, said he did not receive any evacuation notice. As the storm surge began pouring in Wednesday morning, he said, he considered evacuating but realized it was too late.
He climbed up a ladder with his 70-year-old wife and dog to reach a crawl space in his garage. He brought tools in case he needed to break through the roof to escape.
“It was terrifying,” Brosseau said. “It was the absolute scariest thing. Trying to get that dog and my wife up a ladder to the crawl space. And then to spend six hours there.”
Some residents said they had seen the forecasts but decided to remain at home anyway — veterans of many past storms with dire predictions that had not come to pass.
“People were made aware, they were told about the dangers and some people just made the decision that they did not want to leave,” DeSantis said Friday.
Joe Santini, a retired physician assistant, said he would not have fled his home even if there had been an evacuation order issued well before the storm. He said that he had lived in the Fort Myers area most of his life, and that he would not know where else to go.
“I’ve stuck around for every other one,” he said.
The water rushed into his home around dusk Wednesday night, and Friday, there was still a high-water mark about a foot above the floor — leaving Santini a little stunned. “I don’t think it’s ever surged as high as it did,” he said.
Lee County is now an epicenter of devastation, with mass destruction at Fort Myers Beach, the partial collapse of the Sanibel Causeway and entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. With water mains broken, the county utilities agency has advised residents to boil their water.
President Joe Biden said Friday that the destruction from the storm was likely to be among the worst in U.S. history.
“It’s going to take months, years to rebuild,” he said.
© 2022 The New York Times Company
Ian is long gone but water keeps rising in central Florida
Paddling Home Canoes and kayaks sit tied up to a sign on a flooded street in Seminole County, Fla., on Sunday, Oct. 2, 2022. Residents in central Florida donned fishing waders, boots and bug spray and canoed or kayaked to their homes on streets where floodwaters continued rising Sunday despite it being four days since Hurricane Ian tore through the state. (AP Photo/Mike Schneider)More
MIKE SCHNEIDER
Sun, October 2, 2022 at 12:48 PM·2 min read
GENEVA, Fla. (AP) — Residents in central Florida donned fishing waders, boots and bug spray and canoed or kayaked to their homes on streets where floodwaters continued rising Sunday despite it being four days since Hurricane Ian tore through the state.
The waters flooded homes and streets that had been passable just a day or two earlier.
Ben Bertat found 4 inches (10 centimeters) of water in his house by Lake Harney off North Jungle Street in a rural part of Seminole County, north of Orlando, after kayaking to it Sunday morning. Only a day earlier, there had been no water.
“I think it’s going to get worse because all of this water has to get to the lake” said Bertat, pointing to the water flooding the road. “With ground saturation, all this swamp is full and it just can’t take any more water. It doesn’t look like it’s getting any lower.”
Gabriel Madlang kayaked through 3 feet (1 meter) of water on his street, delivering sandbags to stave off water that was 2 inches (5 centimeters) from entering his home.
“My home is close to underwater,” Madlang said Sunday morning before paddling to his house. “Right now, I’m just going to sandbag as much as I can and hope and pray.”
Two hours later, his house still was not flooded, and he was retrieving more sandbags to cover the back side of the house.
"We will see what happens," he said.
Madlang's street was in a flood zone and most of the residents with mortgages on the street of about 30 houses had flood insurance, but several of the residents who had lived there for decades didn't, Madling said.
Seminole County officials warned residents this weekend that flooding could continue for several days, particularly in areas near the St. Johns River and its tributaries, and said 1,200 residents have been affected by the flooding or other damage from Ian.
“Even as the rain has stopped, we still have the opportunity for more flooding," Alan Harris, director of Seminole’s office for emergency management, said at a news briefing.
Tara Casel has never seen flooding on her street near Lake Harney like she did Sunday morning, despite living through multiple hurricanes. She and her husband used a canoe to get to their house and feared it would have water.
“We were here last night and it was pretty bad,” she said. “But this morning looks worse.”
Rescue Crews in Florida Find Fully Submerged House With Human Remains Inside
Dan Ladden-Hall, Justin Rohrlich, Michael Daly
Fri, September 30, 2022
Joe Raedle/Getty
Rescue crews going house to house in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Ian have encountered harrowing scenes, including scores of stranded people and at least one house that was completely submerged with human remains inside.
Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s emergency management director, said during a Friday morning press briefing that authorities are reviewing 21 fatalities to see if they’re related to the catastrophic hurricane. The death toll is expected to rise as many parts of Lee County—including the barrier islands of Sanibel and Captiva—remain inaccessible by road, slowing the rescue process.
Guthrie said that crews spotted an undisclosed number of drowning victims at a house in an undisclosed part of Lee County.
“Let me paint the picture for you. The water was up over the rooftop but we had a Coast Guard rescue swimmer swim down into it and he could identify what appeared to be human remains,” he said. “We do not know exactly how many... until the water recedes and we have the special equipment to get in there.”
On Friday afternoon, the confirmed death toll stood at 25, according to CNN.
Hurricane Ian ravaged parts of Fort Myers Beach.
Joe Raedle/Getty
Gov. Ron DeSantis said officials “fully expect to have mortality from this hurricane.” He said late Thursday that at least 700 rescues had been completed, though it remained unclear how many more people are still trapped. After surveying some coastal towns from the air on Thursday, DeSantis called the damage “indescribable.”
One of those deaths occurred in the town of New Smyrna Beach in Volusia County, where 67-year-old Jerry Argo and his wife found themselves trapped inside their home Thursday night as the unrelenting storm surged. While the couple waited to be rescued, Argo slipped inside the house, hitting his head on the floor, his step-grandson Samuel Mackey told The Daily Beast on Friday.
Unable to get up again, Argo died as the floodwaters rose over him, according to authorities. His wife, Alice, and the pair’s two dogs, survived and are now staying in a temporary shelter.
In Fort Myers, a 4-month-old baby went into cardiac arrest after rolling over into a position that restricted his airway. However, the child’s mom, certified lifeguard Mariah Lane, began performing CPR and managed to revive her son, who is named Ace, before paramedics arrived moments later.
“His mother... was out [of the room] cooking,” the baby’s grandfather, Richard Miller, told The Daily Beast. “And every five minutes or so, she goes and checks on him. And this time, he had rolled over. And she picked him up, and his face was all blue.”
Meanwhile, the family’s neighbors have banded together to help one another recover and rebuild.
“If one doesn’t have, the other one gives,” Miller said. “We’ve helped several neighbors help put up shutters, and helped take them down. If somebody doesn’t have a generator, there’s a cord going across the street from another house.”
Ian left widespread flooding, catastrophic infrastructure damage, and ongoing power outages after it made landfall in Florida on Wednesday afternoon as one of the most powerful storms in American history.
After making landfall as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds on Thursday, Ian steadily lost power before regaining strength over the Atlantic.
The storm made a second landfall near Georgetown, South Carolina, just before 2:30 p.m. Friday afternoon as a Category 1 storm with 85 mph winds.
He Rescued His Neighbor—Then Had a Yacht Crash Onto His Doorstep
On Friday morning, the National Weather Service said a danger from life-threatening storm surge will be in effect along the coasts of northeast Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Hurricane-force winds are also expected to batter the coasts of South Carolina and southeastern North Carolina.
Although officials have issued warnings to residents in all of the states in Ian’s projected paths, fears are particularly strong for those in low-lying Charleston, South Carolina, where nine out of 10 residential properties are thought to be vulnerable to storm surge flooding.
Biblical downpours that accompanied Ian are already threatening to push river flooding to record levels in Central Florida in the coming days, the National Hurricane Center said. As many as half the roads in some areas of the state were made impassable by floods.
Parts of Sanibel Causeway were washed away along with sections of the bridge, cutting off Sanibel Island.
Joe Raedle/Getty
Collapses of several sections of the only bridge between the mainland and Sanibel Island—a vacation hotspot off the coast of Fort Myers—left the island inaccessible by road. At least two fatalities on the island were confirmed late Thursday.
Over two million customers were still without power on Friday morning, according to tracking site PowerOutage.us.
After a state of emergency was declared in South Carolina, the state’s emergency management division issued urgent advice on Friday before Ian’s arrival. Residents in affected areas were instructed to avoid walking in moving water or driving through flooded areas. “If there’s any possibility of a flash flood, move to higher ground,” the organization tweeted. “Do not wait to be told to move.”
—with additional reporting by Michael Daly
Dan Ladden-Hall, Justin Rohrlich, Michael Daly
Fri, September 30, 2022
Joe Raedle/Getty
Rescue crews going house to house in Florida in the wake of Hurricane Ian have encountered harrowing scenes, including scores of stranded people and at least one house that was completely submerged with human remains inside.
Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s emergency management director, said during a Friday morning press briefing that authorities are reviewing 21 fatalities to see if they’re related to the catastrophic hurricane. The death toll is expected to rise as many parts of Lee County—including the barrier islands of Sanibel and Captiva—remain inaccessible by road, slowing the rescue process.
Guthrie said that crews spotted an undisclosed number of drowning victims at a house in an undisclosed part of Lee County.
“Let me paint the picture for you. The water was up over the rooftop but we had a Coast Guard rescue swimmer swim down into it and he could identify what appeared to be human remains,” he said. “We do not know exactly how many... until the water recedes and we have the special equipment to get in there.”
On Friday afternoon, the confirmed death toll stood at 25, according to CNN.
Hurricane Ian ravaged parts of Fort Myers Beach.
Joe Raedle/Getty
Gov. Ron DeSantis said officials “fully expect to have mortality from this hurricane.” He said late Thursday that at least 700 rescues had been completed, though it remained unclear how many more people are still trapped. After surveying some coastal towns from the air on Thursday, DeSantis called the damage “indescribable.”
One of those deaths occurred in the town of New Smyrna Beach in Volusia County, where 67-year-old Jerry Argo and his wife found themselves trapped inside their home Thursday night as the unrelenting storm surged. While the couple waited to be rescued, Argo slipped inside the house, hitting his head on the floor, his step-grandson Samuel Mackey told The Daily Beast on Friday.
Unable to get up again, Argo died as the floodwaters rose over him, according to authorities. His wife, Alice, and the pair’s two dogs, survived and are now staying in a temporary shelter.
In Fort Myers, a 4-month-old baby went into cardiac arrest after rolling over into a position that restricted his airway. However, the child’s mom, certified lifeguard Mariah Lane, began performing CPR and managed to revive her son, who is named Ace, before paramedics arrived moments later.
“His mother... was out [of the room] cooking,” the baby’s grandfather, Richard Miller, told The Daily Beast. “And every five minutes or so, she goes and checks on him. And this time, he had rolled over. And she picked him up, and his face was all blue.”
Meanwhile, the family’s neighbors have banded together to help one another recover and rebuild.
“If one doesn’t have, the other one gives,” Miller said. “We’ve helped several neighbors help put up shutters, and helped take them down. If somebody doesn’t have a generator, there’s a cord going across the street from another house.”
Ian left widespread flooding, catastrophic infrastructure damage, and ongoing power outages after it made landfall in Florida on Wednesday afternoon as one of the most powerful storms in American history.
After making landfall as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds on Thursday, Ian steadily lost power before regaining strength over the Atlantic.
The storm made a second landfall near Georgetown, South Carolina, just before 2:30 p.m. Friday afternoon as a Category 1 storm with 85 mph winds.
He Rescued His Neighbor—Then Had a Yacht Crash Onto His Doorstep
On Friday morning, the National Weather Service said a danger from life-threatening storm surge will be in effect along the coasts of northeast Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Hurricane-force winds are also expected to batter the coasts of South Carolina and southeastern North Carolina.
Although officials have issued warnings to residents in all of the states in Ian’s projected paths, fears are particularly strong for those in low-lying Charleston, South Carolina, where nine out of 10 residential properties are thought to be vulnerable to storm surge flooding.
Biblical downpours that accompanied Ian are already threatening to push river flooding to record levels in Central Florida in the coming days, the National Hurricane Center said. As many as half the roads in some areas of the state were made impassable by floods.
Parts of Sanibel Causeway were washed away along with sections of the bridge, cutting off Sanibel Island.
Joe Raedle/Getty
Collapses of several sections of the only bridge between the mainland and Sanibel Island—a vacation hotspot off the coast of Fort Myers—left the island inaccessible by road. At least two fatalities on the island were confirmed late Thursday.
Over two million customers were still without power on Friday morning, according to tracking site PowerOutage.us.
After a state of emergency was declared in South Carolina, the state’s emergency management division issued urgent advice on Friday before Ian’s arrival. Residents in affected areas were instructed to avoid walking in moving water or driving through flooded areas. “If there’s any possibility of a flash flood, move to higher ground,” the organization tweeted. “Do not wait to be told to move.”
—with additional reporting by Michael Daly
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