The First Day of Hurricane Irene: Florida’s Hurricane Ian’s Elusive Flooding Prepares for a Long-Term Recovery
A tropical storm warning has been issued from the Georgia-South Carolina state line up to Cape Fear, North Carolina. There is a chance that the storm surge of 7 feet and 12 inches of rain could hit parts of coastal South Carolina.
As Florida wakes up Friday to apocalyptic, coast-to-coast damage – with searchers still going door-to-door and millions without power – deadly Hurricane Ian has begun lashing South Carolina, where an expected Friday afternoon landfall threatens more lethal flooding and could be powerful enough to alter the coastal landscape.
It’s Fort Naples, Fla. The extent of Hurricane Ians destruction became clearer on Thursday, as people in southwest Florida began to assess the damage and prepare for a long recovery.
Rescuers throughout the state have been coming to the aid of trapped residents via boat and aircraft. More than 1,900 people have been rescued as of Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a news conference.
The Florida Panhandle of Flooding: Water, Electricity, Heat and Carbon Monoxide Contamination During a Tropical Storm
The storm is posing new dangerous dangers of its own. Some standing water is electrified, officials warned, while maneuvering through debris-strewn buildings and streets – many without working traffic signals – risks injury. Lack of air conditioning can lead to heat illness, and improper generator use can cause carbon monoxide poisoning.
In North Port, a woman who survived the storm stood in the house that was damaged. There was part of her ceiling that was hanging down.
“And all of a sudden, the water was coming in through the doors – the top, the bottom, the windows over here,” she told CNN’s John Berman. “It’s all in my closets; I’ve got to empty out my closets.”
• More than 2 million outages: Millions of Floridians who were in Ian’s path are still in the dark as of early Friday, according to PowerOutage.us. Most counties with the highest percentage of residents without power lie in the southwest, including Lee, Charlotte, DeSoto and Hardee.
In central and northern Florida, record flooding was recorded, including at least three rivers that hit all-time flood records. The officials warned about the dangers of flooding in some areas.
Sanibel and Captiva islands in southwest Florida are isolated from the mainland after several parts of a causeway were torn away. At least two people were killed in the storm in Sanibel, and the bridge may need to be completely rebuilt, local officials said. Chip Farrar, a resident of the tiny island of Matlacha, told CNN that 50 feet of road essential to reaching the mainland bridge has been washed out, and a second nearby bridge has also collapsed.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/30/weather/hurricane-south-carolina-path-florida-aftermath-friday/index.html
A South Carolina Governor’s Perspective on Hurricanes and Hurricane Charley-Like Events, and a Call for Preparation for Impact on Friday
South Carolina’s governor urged residents not to underestimate storm danger and to get ready for impact on Friday.
The coastlines along Georgia and South Carolina may sustain significant alterations because the powerful waves and storm surges brought by Ian could inundate coastal sand dunes, according to the US Geological Survey.
In addition to flooding communities behind the dunes, the storm may push sand back and deposit it inland, which could “reduce the height of protective sand dunes, alter beach profiles and leave areas behind the dunes more vulnerable to future storms,” the agency said.
Although state officials had not released a death toll by late in the day, Mr. DeSantis said Thursday night that “we absolutely expect” to learn of storm-related fatalities as rescuers work through a backlog of 911 calls and scour the most devastated neighborhoods. More than 500 people in Charlotte and Lee Counties, the hardest hit area, were helped out on Thursday by the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
While Ian left Florida on Thursday afternoon as a tropical storm, South Carolina residents were bracing for lashing winds and heavy rain as it quickly became a hurricane again at sea; forecasters said it could strengthen again before doubling back onto land there by Friday.
Ian was interested in how previous personal experiences with hurricanes influence peoples decisions. Since Ian’s death, some areas devastated by him have had close calls with hurricanes and were almost hit by Hurricane Charley. Many of the same communities were hit by storms, but not as much as Ian, which may have caused residents to wonder if they were safe.
“There are a lot of things which are connected, and we’re trying to use models to sort through some of these complicated relationships,” says Thomas Knutson, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US. The dots are being put together to forecast how hurricanes will change as the world gets hotter.
Sanibel Island is a small island located to the south of Florida that is home to 6,600 people and is just south of where the storm made landfall. The Category 4 storm caused severe damage and flooding to Fort Myers and other gulf coast cities.
Fort Myers Beach City Councilman Bill Veach said his 90-year-old cottage is in ruins, with only one section that was a recent addition left standing. Two blocks away, pieces of his home were found.
“You see a friend that you weren’t sure was alive or dead and that brings you joy. A joy that is more than the loss of property.
A Florida Girl with a Blizzard: I’m seeing sooo much hope on the Florida Gulf Coast, and Is there still hope on Pine Island?
Her family said they couldn’t reach her after they spoke with her on Wednesday. They learned Friday that the 49-year-old had been found dead in her Cape Coral home.
One hundred storms won’t hurt you as much as one storm will, said Susan McGuire, who moved to Florida from Maryland. “My husband’s business whipped out, my daughter is dead … I never had a blizzard take anything away from me.”
On Sanibel Island, now cut off from the Florida peninsula after Ian wiped out a portion of the roadway connecting them, every house shows damage, Sanibel Fire Chief William Briscoe said.
“There are a lot places that are not livable. There are places that are very dangerous off the foundation. There are snakes and alligator running around.
A similar situation is playing out on nearby Pine Island, the largest barrier island on Florida’s Gulf Coast. It’s a place that used to be a tranquil fishing and kayaking destination. It is a scene of total carnage, with cracked roads and destroyed homes.
“Food is being delivered to Pine Island. Is this enough to keep them going for a long time? I can’t say that yet, none of us can,” Lee County Manager Roger Desjarlais said Monday.
Emergency physician Dr. Ben Abo, who joined rescuers on Pine Island, said crews are encountering residents who were in denial the storm would hit the area and are now running out of supplies.
“I’m seeing a lot of despair, but I’m also seeing hope,” Abo said. “I’m seeing urban search and rescue, fire rescue, bringing hopes to people that we’re going to get through this. But we have to do it in stages.”
“This is not necessarily going to be a bridge you’re going to want to go 45 miles per an hour over maybe, but at least you’ll have connectivity to the mainland,” the governor said.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/us/hurricane-ian-florida-recovery-tuesday/index.html
Johnny Lauder, who died in a hurricane, told CNN “It’s been three days since I learned about his father David Park,” the victim of Hurricane Ian’s flood
He painted a depressing picture of the area, describing thousands of destroyed boats that have ended up in yards, mangroves and sunken in shallow waters, along with the environmental dangers from leaking diesel and fuel.
A former police officer named Johnny Lauder told CNN he sprang into action after his mother called in a panic and said water was reaching her chest.
The water was up to the windows, and I heard her screaming. There was a big sigh of relief when she realized that she had air in her lungs, and it was a scare that she might have been hurt.
There are people waiting to hear something about a loved one. It’s been three days since she heard anything about her father, David Park, who was admitted to ShorePoint ICU in Port Charlotte days before Hurricane Ian made landfall.
Tonia told CNN that it was his last contact as of Friday. No telephones, nothing. I have no idea if he is alive. I have made contact in many different ways to get information because we’re stuck. There is no way to get to him.
Tonia lives nearly an hour away from Port Charlotte and is cut off from being able to reach the area by flooding in Arcadia, which has blocked access for anybody to get across town, she said.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/04/us/hurricane-ian-florida-recovery-tuesday/index.html
Why Did Hurricane Ian Injure Florida? The View from CNN on Hurricanes, Climate Change, and the Elements of Jacksonville, Fla.
Hospitals in Florida have been experiencing “significant pressure” on capacity since Ian hit, said Mary Mayhew, president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association.
Emergency departments have sustained damage, staffing has been impacted as many hospital workers have been displaced or lost their vehicles in the hurricane, and facilities lost reliable access to water.
When the nursing homes were temporarily closed due to the storm or patients were left with no place to go, hospitals don’t usually discharge patients with no place to go.
Cara Cuite is a health psychologist and assistant extension specialist in the department of human ecology at Rutgers University. Rebecca Morss is a senior scientist and deputy director of the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The views expressed here are their own. Read more opinion on CNN.
More than 100 people died as Hurricane Ian struck Florida. Why was this storm so deadly? As researchers who study how people make evacuation decisions before coastal storms, we believe that it is critical to understand the features of this storm – and the communication about it – that contributed to its deadliness.
Meteorologists’ forecasts of Ian’s probable track changed as the storm approached landfall, as forecasts typically do. The storm deviated to the south and Lee County, which had a lower possibility of a direct impact, was directly in Ian’s path.
Ian was most likely affected by climate change, which caused its wind speeds to increase dramatically when it passed over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Evacuation Zone Locators in Lee County, Florida, Early Before a Tropical Hurricane Melts, and Induced by a Public Shelter
Emergency managers typically need at least 48 hours to successfully evacuate areas of southwest Florida. However, voluntary evacuation orders for Lee County were issued less than 48 hours prior to landfall, and for some areas were made mandatory just 24 hours before the storm came ashore. This was not as much time as the emergency management plan outlined in Lee County.
Some say the lack of time to evacuate was a reason why they stayed behind, but other factors could have been involved.
In order to correctly follow evacuation orders, people need to first know their evacuation zone. Research from other areas of the country indicates that many people don’t. That’s why the evacuation zone locator websites in the affected counties were crucial. Some websites crashed before the storm because so many people were checking their zones.
Public officials and the media should continue to provide concrete information about where, how and why to evacuate, which can be critical factors in people’s decisions to leave.
If a shelter could accommodate people with special needs, it would be helpful to the more than 33,000 people who used the public shelter system. Pets and disability remain cited as reasons why more support is needed for those who did not evacuate.
The St. Johns River – a lazy river flowing northward on the east side of Orlando – has become uninaccessible since hurricane Ian
A 57 year old woman died after her roof caved in due to the flooding in the area. A 96-year-old man drowned after getting trapped under a parked car in Charlotte County. In Fort Myers Beach, the body of an 85-year-old woman was found in a tree several days after the storm.
The circumstances of many of the deaths remained unclear, but the information released this week by state and local governments made it clear that a storm overwhelmed both residents and emergency responders.
Hundreds of homes in central Florida are still submerged in floodwater as the St. Johns – a notoriously lazy river on the east side of the peninsula – lethargically drains the historic rainfall that Hurricane Ian dropped nearly two weeks ago.
Kelly is expecting the flooding to go on for a couple of months and officials are expecting the disaster to start moving north over the next few weeks.
In Seminole County northeast of Orlando, upwards of 400 homes are “inaccessible” due to flooding, according to county planning manager Steven Lerner. The city of Geneva is wedged between two lakes, and is particularly affected by the flooding.
“This area historically floods, and many residents stick it out” in their homes, Lerner told CNN in a phone interview. It is not known how many people have left their homes due to the flooding.
The St. Johns River begins southeast of Orlando and flows north through dozens of cities on the east side of the Florida Peninsula before it drains into the Atlantic Ocean in Jacksonville.
The river flows across 300 miles, yet only drops around 30 feet – making this river one of the slowest in the world, according to Scott Kelly, a forecaster at the National Weather Service in Melbourne.
The West Side of the River, Flooding by Hurricane Ian, and the Associated Tropical Storm Nicole, as it Forms Southeast of the Bahamas
There is an unincorporated community on the west side of the river just south of Lake George. Lerner said there is usually a two-week delay for water to flow from Geneva to Astor; so they should see the water level rise soon.
Within DeLand there are homes and businesses that have been flooded by the dark brown water that has pushed beyond the river’s banks.
Kelly said that DeLand and Astor have had record flooding with the event. “So this is not something anyone has seen at least in the last 70 years.”
Ian’s rainfall was at least 10% higher because of human-caused climate change, according to a rapid analysis by scientists at Stony Brook University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
It is going to start raining again, so people are going to freak out. There will be more spotty showers, but they won’t have a big impact on the river level.
Some of the areas that were still devastated by Hurricane Ian are still in recovery mode, and could be drenched with 2 to 4 inches of rain. South of Jacksonville is at risk of seeing 1 to 4 inches of rain, while areas to the north is at risk of having 1 to 2 inches.
The warning comes as Subtropical Storm Nicole has formed in the southwest Atlantic about 555 miles east of northwestern Bahamas, according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm, now packing winds of 45 mph with higher gusts, is expected to begin impacting Florida by Tuesday evening.
Already, the US territories of Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands are under a flash flood watch through Monday afternoon, and tropical storm watches are in effect for northwest Bahamas.
As the system forms, it will possibly churn toward Florida and the Southeast US through early this week, according to CNN Meteorologist Robert Shackelford.
“I encourage all Floridians to be prepared and make a plan in the event a storm impacts Florida,” DeSantis said in a news release. We will keep in constant contact with the state and local government partners as we monitor the path and trajectory of Invest 98L.
On Election Day on Tuesday, the Florida Peninsula can expect strong winds. There is a possibility of rain throughout the day in central and eastern cities such as Miami, Daytona Beach, and Orlando.
Forecast of a Tropical-Subtropical Storm During Ian’s Recovery from the Deep Inelastic Scenarios in the Northern Mariana Sea
During the recovery from Ian, officials are coordinating with other emergency management authorities in the state.
The goal is to identify potential resources gaps and then create plans to respond quickly and efficiently in the event of a storm.
And although the exact forecast for the upcoming storm is still unclear, forecasters said confidence has increased that the storm system could develop into a tropical or subtropical depression within the next two days.