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Florida expects floods in Ian’s wake for days as Sunshine State and Carolinas recover | DailyExpertNews

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Floridians will continue to experience major flooding on Saturday and will likely continue for days as they try to recover from deadly Hurricane Ian, expected to be the costliest storm in Sunshine State history.

At least 66 people are said to have been killed by Ian in Florida alone, and four people have been killed in storm-related incidents in North Carolina, officials say. Ian also cut power to hundreds of thousands in the Carolinas from Friday through early Saturday.

The biggest impacts remain in Florida, where river flooding could continue far inland into next week, forecasters warn.

In western Florida’s Arcadia — tens of miles inland — river floods continued to cover part of the city like a lake on Saturday, rendering a state highway invisible and swallowing everything but the roof of a gas station, a DailyExpertNews crew there saw. Near Sarasota, officers had to evacuate a neighborhood early Saturday due to a possible levee breach due to concerns about flooding.

Live Updates: Recovery Efforts Begin in Florida and the Carolinas

In hard-hit Fort Myers, where storm surges have swallowed vehicles and the first floors of many homes, Rob Guarino receives friends in his high-rise apartment who have lost everything.

“A few of them are staying with me now. They just have nowhere to go,” Guarino told DailyExpertNews’s Boris Sanchez Saturday morning.

Saturday night Ian was a post-tropical cyclone, weakening over southern Virginia, and it could drop several more inches of rain over parts of West Virginia and western Maryland Sunday morning, the National Hurricane Center said.

On Wednesday, Ian slammed into southwest Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, pulverizing coastal homes and holding residents in flooding, especially in the Fort Myers and Naples areas. It moved inland on Thursday, bringing strong winds and damaging flooding to central and northeastern areas.

The hurricane made landfall again in South Carolina on Friday between Charleston and Myrtle Beach as a Category 1 storm, submerging homes and vehicles along the shoreline and eventually draining hundreds of thousands of others in the Carolinas and Virginia.

More than a million Florida customers still had no power Saturday night, and more than 99,000 had no power in North Carolina, according to poweroutage.us.

In Florida’s Fort Myers Beach, where a raging storm surge swept away homes and left little but rubble, shocked survivors process what they saw and mourn those who lost them.

Kevin Behen, who rode out the storm on the second floor of a Fort Myers Beach building, told DailyExpertNews Friday night that he knew two men who died while trying to help their wife escape a house that began to flood.

“These guys pushed their wives out of the windows to where there was a tree,” Behen said. “They just looked at their wives and said, ‘We can’t take it anymore. We love you. Bye,’ and that was it.”

About 90% of the island “virtually disappeared,” Fort Myers Beach Town Councilman Dan Allers said Friday. “Unless you have a high-rise apartment or a newer concrete house built to the same standards today, your house is pretty much gone.”

“I’ve been in this community since the mid-’70s. I’ve been a police officer for 25 years, been through a lot of storms, this is by far the worst I’ve ever seen,” Fort Myers Mayor Kevin Anderson told me. . DailyExpertNews’s Jim Acosta Saturday night.

“However severe this storm is, the people are in a good mood and they are determined not to be defeated,” the mayor added.

Sanibel and Captiva Islands, meanwhile, have been cut off from the mainland after sections of a causeway were swept away by the storm.

Those living in Charlotte County in western Florida are “facing a tragedy” with no homes, electricity or water supplies, said Claudette Smith, public information officer for the sheriff’s office.

“We need everything, to put it simply. We need everything. We need all hands on deck,” Smith told DailyExpertNews on Friday. “The people who have come to our rescue have been tremendously helpful, but we really need everything.”

How to help Hurricane Ian victims

Further south, in Naples, Brandon and Dylan Barlow were cleaning up their grandfather’s flooded house on Saturday morning. Dylan, who lives nearby, recalled watching the storm from his own home and realized that a channel at their grandfather’s was rising too fast for comfort.

‘I didn’t ask him if we could pick him up; l told we’ll pick him up,” Dylan Barlow recalled on Saturday. “So we took the car. We got to his house and by the time we got him out of the house there was about two feet of water.

“And we drove back into the water, and it was very close, but we got him out of there and we got him back safely to my mother’s house.”

At least 66 deaths suspected of being related to Ian have been reported, according to the sheriff there, including about 35 in Lee County. The toll also includes: 12 in Charlotte County, eight in Collier County, five in Volusia County, three in Sarasota County, one in Polk County, one in Lake County, one in Manatee County, according to officials.

From the coasts of Florida to inland cities like Orlando, dangerous flooding has forced locals into dire conditions. In an Orlando neighborhood where roads are covered by deep water, some residents traveled by boat to help others.

Local and state officials rescued and evacuated more than 1,070 people from flooded areas in southwestern and central Florida and transported 78 people from a flooded retirement home, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s office said in a press release on Saturday.

Rear Admiral Brendan McPherson said the U.S. Coast Guard has also conducted rescues, but post-storm conditions remained challenging, he told DailyExpertNews on Friday.

“We fly and we operate in unrecognizable areas. There are no street signs. They don’t look like they used to. Buildings that were once community standards are no more,” he said.

And Saturday in western Florida, concerns about a possible levee breach forced sheriff officers to go door-to-door in the Sarasota-area community of Hidden River to warn residents of potential flooding there, the sheriff’s office said.

The problem could lead to flooding problems for about 70 homes on the east side of the Hidden River neighborhood, the sheriff’s office added later, encouraging those residents to consider evacuating.

South of Hidden River, about 150 additional people also had to be evacuated because of water intrusion into the town of North Port, where thousands of homes have already been flooded, fire chief Scott Titus said.

Four storm-related deaths were reported in North Carolina on Saturday afternoon, the governor’s office said, including a man who drowned when his truck ended up in a flooded swamp; two people who died in separate crashes; and a man who died of carbon monoxide poisoning after running a generator in a locked garage, the governor’s office said.

No deaths have been reported in South Carolina, the governor there said.

The storm has flooded homes and vehicles along the South Carolina coastline. Two piers — one on Pawleys Island and another in North Myrtle Beach — partially collapsed as high winds pushed the water even higher.

Edgar Stephens, who manages Cherry Grove Pier in North Myrtle Beach, was moments away when a 100-foot (30-meter) stretch of the pier plunged into the ocean. The people who own the pier are committed to rebuilding it, Stephens said, but it could take months to obtain all the necessary materials.

Floodwater is being sucked from a restaurant near where Hurricane Ian made landfall on September 30, 2022 in Georgetown, South Carolina.

Authorities are also cataloging damage on Pawleys Island in South Carolina, a coastal town about 70 miles north of Charleston. The biggest concern there, according to the mayor, is how to clear debris so the island can be safe again.

“It was a Category 1 hurricane, but we experienced a massive storm surge today, probably more than most people expected,” Mayor Brian Henry told DailyExpertNews’s Jake Tapper on Friday.

A child runs under a falling tree as a result of Hurricane Ian on Friday in Charleston, South Carolina.

“Most of us didn’t believe we would see the storm surge barrier at 7-plus feet,” Henry said. “It’s starting to diminish, but we have a huge amount of water on the roads and across the island.”

Residents of Pawleys Island will not be allowed to return home until safety assessments are fully completed on Saturday, police said.

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