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This satellite image taken at 9:30am ET and provided by NOAA shows Tropical Storm Karl in the Gulf of Mexico, on Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022. Karl grew a little stronger off Mexico’s southern Gulf coast on Wednesday and was expected to approach land by the weekend without gaining hurricane strength. (NOAA via AP)
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Former Hurricane Julia tore a deadly path through Guatemala and El Salvador on Monday, killing dozens and drenching the nations with torrential rains. At least 28 people were reported dead as a direct or indirect result of the storm.
Guatemala’s disaster prevention agency said five people died after a hillside collapsed on their house in Alta Verapaz province, burying them. And in Huehuetenango province, near Mexico, nine people died, including a soldier killed while performing rescue work.
Authorities in El Salvador said five Salvadoran army soldiers died after a wall collapsed at a house where they sought refuge in the town of Comasagua, where hundreds of police and soldiers have been conducting anti-gang raids. Another soldier was injured.
MARVIN RECINOS/AFP via Getty Images
Two other people died in the eastern El Salvador town of Guatajiagua after heavy rains caused a wall of their home to collapse. Another man in El Salvador died when he was swept away by a current, and another died when a tree fell on him.
Rivers overflowed their banks and El Salvador declared a state of emergency and opened 80 storm shelters.
In neighboring Honduras, a 22-year-old woman died when she was swept away by currents, and three people died when their boat swamped or capsized. A man in Nicaragua was killed by a falling tree.
Julia hit Nicaragua’s central Caribbean coast early Sunday as a hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph and survived the passage over the country’s mountainous terrain, entering the Pacific late in the day as a tropical storm..
By Monday, Julia had moved inland over Guatemala and its winds were down to 30 mph.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Julia was centered about 80 miles west-northwest of Guatemala City, and was moving west-northwest at 15 mph.
The center said floods and mudslides were possible across Central America and southern Mexico through Tuesday, with the storm expected to bring as much as 15 inches of rain in isolated areas.
OSWALDO RIVAS/AFP via Getty Images
In Guatemala, two people were listed as missing and two were hospitalized, and about 1,300 people had to leave their homes because of flooding and rising streams.
Julia was expected to dissipate later Monday as it passes along the Guatemalan coast.
Colombia’s national disaster agency reported Sunday that Julia blew the roofs off several houses and knocked over trees as it blasted past San Andres Island east of Nicaragua. There were no immediate reports of fatalities there.
In Nicaragua, Vice President Rosario Murillo told TN8 television that 9,500 people had been evacuated to shelters.
Heavy rains and evacuations were also reported in Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica, where some highways were closed due to the downpours.
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MEXICO CITY — Tropical Storm Karl formed off Mexico’s southern Gulf coast Tuesday and is forecast to meander in the Gulf for a few days without reaching hurricane strength.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Karl had winds of 40 mph (65 kph) Tuesday afternoon. It was centered about 110 miles (180 kms) east-northeast of the port city of Veracruz and moving northwest at 6 mph (9 kph).
Mexico declared a tropical storm warning from Veracruz northward to Cabo Rojo.
The storm’s center is expected to move northward before changing course and turning inland sometime later in the week.
Karl formed one day after former Hurricane Julia dissipated in the Pacific after having directly or indirectly caused the deaths of 28 people in Central America following its landfall on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast.
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FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. — The seafood industry in southwest Florida is racing against time and the elements to save what’s left of a major shrimping fleet — and a lifestyle — that was battered by Hurricane Ian.
The storm’s ferocious wind and powerful surge hurled a couple dozen shrimp boats atop wharves and homes along the harbor on Estero Island. Jesse Clapham, who oversees a dozen trawlers for a large seafood company at Fort Myers Beach, is trying to get boats back to sea as quickly as possible — before their engines, winches and pulleys seize up from being out of the water.
One of two shrimpers that didn’t sink or get tossed onto land went out Sunday, but the victory was small compared with the task ahead.
“There’s 300 people who work for us and all of them are out of a job right now. I’m sure they’d rather just mow all this stuff down and build a giant condo here, but we’re not going to give up,” said Clapham, who manages the fishing fleet at Erickson and Jensen Seafood, which he said handles $10 million in shrimp annually.
The company’s fractured wharves, flooded office and processing house are located on Main Street beside another large seafood company, Trico Shrimp Co. There, a crane lifted the outrigger of grounded shrimper Aces & Eights — the first step toward getting it back in the water. Across the yard, the massive Kayden Nicole and Renee Lynn sat side-by-side in the parking lot, stern to bow.
Shrimping is the largest piece of Florida’s seafood industry, with a value of almost $52 million in 2016, state statistics show. Gulf of Mexico shrimp from Fort Myers has been shipped all over the United States for generations.
Now, it’s a matter of when the fishing can resume and whether there will still be experienced crews to operate the boats when that happens.
Deckhand Michele Bryant didn’t just lose a job when the boat where she works was grounded, she lost her home. Shrimping crews are at sea for as long as two months at a time, she said, so members often don’t have homes on land.
“I’ve got nowhere to stay,” she said. “I’m living in a tent.”
Richard Brown’s situation is just as precarious. A citizen of Guyana who was working on a boat out of Miami when Ian hit southwest Florida, Brown rode out the storm on one of four boats that were lashed together along a harbor seawall.
“We tried to fight the storm. The lines were bursting. We kept replacing them but when the wind turned everybody was on land,” he said.
There’s no way to catch shrimp on a boat surrounded by dirt, so Brown is staying busy scraping barnacles off the hull of the Gulf Star. “It’s like it’s on dry dock,” he said — but he’s no more sure what to do now than at the height of the storm.
“It was terrifying – the worst experience,” said Brown, who is more than 2,160 miles (3,480 kilometers) from his home in South America. “I was just thinking, ‘You could abandon the ship.’ But where are you going?”
Seafood fleets along the Gulf Coast are used to getting wiped out by hurricanes. Katrina pummeled the industry from Louisiana to Alabama in 2005, and the seafood business in southern Louisiana is still recovering from Hurricane Ida’s punch last year. But this part of Florida hasn’t seen a storm like Ian in a century, leaving people to wonder what happens next.
Dale Kalliainen and his brother followed their father into the shrimping business and owns the trawler Night Wind, which landed amid a mobile home park near a bridge. He said high fuel prices and low-cost imported seafood took a bite out the industry long before Ian did its worst.
“There used to be 300 boats in this harbor and now there’s maybe 50,” he said. “It’s going to be probably years before this business is even close to being back to what it was.”
Clapham, the 47-year-old fleet manager, has spent his entire life on shrimp boats. The industry already operates on a thin margin and needs help recovering from Ian, he said.
“These boats go out and catch $60,000, $70,000 worth of shrimp a month, but it costs $30,000 to $50,000 to put fuel on them and groceries and supplies, and then you’ve got to pay the crew. And sometimes these boats’ (catches) don’t even pay for everything,” he said. “We take money from one boat and get another boat going and send ’em back fishing just to keep going.”
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FORT MYERS, Fla. — An army of 42,000 utility workers has restored electricity to more than 2.5 million businesses and homes in Florida since Hurricane Ian’s onslaught, and Brenda Palmer’s place is among them. By the government’s count, she and her husband Ralph are part of a success story.
Yet turning on the lights in a wrecked mobile home that’s likely beyond repair and reeks of dried river mud and mold isn’t much solace to people who lost a lifetime of work in a few hours of wind, rain and rising seawater. Sorting through soggy old photos of her kids in the shaded ruins of her carport, Palmer couldn’t help but cry.
“Everybody says, ’You can’t save everything, mom,’” she said. “You know, it’s my life. It’s MY life. It’s gone.”
With the major search for victims over and a large swath of Florida’s southwest coast settling in for the long slog of recovering from its first direct hit from a major hurricane in a century, residents are bracing for what will be months, if not years, of work. Mourning lost heirlooms will be hard; so will fights with insurance companies and decisions about what to do next.
Around the corner from the Palmers in Coach Light Manor, a retirement community of 179 mobile homes that was flooded by two creeks and a canal, a sad realization hit Susan Colby sometime between the first time she saw her soggy home after Ian and Sunday, when she was picking through its remains.
“I’m 86 years old and I’m homeless,” she said. “It’s just crazy. I mean, never in my life did I dream that I wouldn’t have a home. But it’s gone.”
Officials have blamed more than 100 deaths, most of them in southwest Florida, on Ian, a powerful Category 4 storm with 155 mph (249 kph) winds. It was the third-deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland this century behind Hurricane Katrina, which left about 1,400 people dead, and Hurricane Sandy, which killed 233 despite weakening to a tropical storm just before landfall.
While Gov. Ron DeSantis has heaped lavish praise on his administration for the early phases of the recovery, including getting running water and lights back on and erecting a temporary bridge to Pine Island, much more remains to be done. There are still mountains of debris to remove; it’s hard to find a road that isn’t lined with waterlogged carpet, ruined furniture, moldy mattresses and pieces of homes.
On the road to Estero Island, scene of the worst damage to Fort Myers Beach, workers are using heavy machines with huge grapples to snatch debris out of swampy areas and deposit it into trucks. Boats of all sizes, from dinghies to huge shrimpers and charter fishing vessels, block roads and sit atop buildings.
DeSantis said at least some of the roadmap for the coming months in southwest Florida may come from the Florida Panhandle, where Category 5 Hurricane Michael wiped out Mexico Beach and much of Panama City in 2018. Panama City leaders will be brought in to offer advice on the cleanup, DeSantis told a weekend news conference.
“They’re going to come down on the ground, they’re going to inspect, and then they’ve going to offer some advice to the local officials here in Lee County, Fort Myers Beach and other places,” DeSantis said. “You can do what you want, you don’t have to accept their advice. But I tell you that was a major, major effort.”
In a region full of retirees, many of whom moved South to get away from the chill of Northern winters, Luther Marth worries that it might be more difficult for some to recover from the psychological effects of Ian than the physical destruction. Two men in their 70s already have taken their own lives after seeing the destruction, officials said.
Fort Myers was sideswiped by Hurricane Irma in 2017, but Marth said that storm was nothing like Ian, and the emotional toll will be greater, especially for older folks.
“I’m 88 years old. People my age struggle,” said Marth, who counts himself and his wife Jacqueline among the lucky despite losing a car and thousands of dollars worth of fishing gear, tools and more when their garage filled with more than 5 feet (1.52 meters) of water.
“If you got wiped out financially you don’t want to start over again, you don’t have the will to start again,” Marth said. “So those are the people my heart breaks for.”
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Erica Lee/CNN
Charlie Whitehead, 64, lives on San Carlos Island, across the Fort Myers Beach isle, and has spent most days since the storm trying to salvage family photos. This one depicts him and his wife, Debbie, when they were younger.
Nearly two weeks since Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida’s southwestern coast, battered communities are slowly beginning to sort through the damage the storm left. Families that were chin-deep in water in their homes have found there is little left to salvage: the furniture that floated around has dried but is now beginning to mold, wood chests and drawers bear signs of the water damage, electronics are now useless and few cars survived the flooding. Debris that piles high in every driveway offers a glimpse into what the homes behind them used to look like and what families held dear but are now forced to throw out. The trash piles include mementos too deformed to save, treasured photographs, rugs, kitchen tables, dining chairs, mirrors, clothes — most of everything covered in mud.
“The big trash trucks with the claws, they just come in, they pick that stuff up like it’s nothing. Seventeen years’ worth of hard work gone in a matter of five minutes,” says Miguel Romero, 26, who lives in the Linda Loma neighborhood, near the beach. Romero, his partner and their 1-year-old daughter, along with his parents, went into the attic of their ground-floor home to survive. Almost everything in the house was ruined. But at the end, like many others here, stuff is stuff, he says, and he’s thankful his family is alive.
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FORT MYERS, Fla. — With her home gone and all her belongings trashed by Hurricane Ian, Alice Pujols wept as she picked through soggy clothes, toys and overturned furniture piled head-high outside a stranger’s house, looking to salvage something — anything — for her four children and herself.
“I’m trying to make it to the next day,” she said. “That’s all I can do. It’s really depressing. It really is.”
For those who lost everything to a natural disaster and even those spared, the anguish can be crushing to return home to find so much gone. Grief can run the gamut from frequent tears to utter despair. Two men in their 70s even took their own lives after viewing their losses, said the medical examiner in Lee County, where Ian first made landfall in southwestern Florida.
The emotional toll in the days, weeks and months after a hurricane, flood or wildfire can be crippling. More pressing needs for food, shelter and clothing often take priority to seeking counseling, which is in short supply even in good times.
“When someone’s in a state of trauma that so many are in, they don’t know where to begin,” said Beth Hatch, CEO of the Collier County, Florida, branch of the National Alliance of Mental Illness. “They need that hand-holding and they need to know that there’s so many people here to help them.”
Hurricane Ian hammered Florida with such ferocity that it wiped out whole neighborhoods, tossed boats onto highways, swept away beaches and swamped homes in roof-deep waters.
With sustained winds of 150 mph (240 kph), it was one of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit southwest Florida. It later cut a watery and wind-battered swath across the Florida peninsula before turning out to sea to regain strength and pummel South Carolina.
It killed more than 100 people, the majority of victims in Florida, making it the third-deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland this century. Even a week after it passed through, officials warned that more victims could yet be found as they continued to inspect the damage. The storm knocked out power to 2.6 million and caused billions of dollars in damage.
Research has shown that between a third and half of those who survive a disaster develop some type of mental distress, said Jennifer Horney, an epidemiology professor at the University of Delaware who studies natural disaster impacts on public health.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety rise along with substance abuse. Those with existing mental disorders are at greater risk of having those conditions exacerbated by the trauma.
A variety of help is available as additional resources are sent to the area.
The state of Florida was setting up support centers and the federal government has a 24-hour disaster distress helpline to provide counseling and crisis support. Hatch’s organization was going to some homes in hard-hit areas to check on clients with mental illness.
The vast majority of people, though, were still assessing damage, trying to retrieve and dry out possessions worth keeping and drag what couldn’t be saved to growing trash heaps by the side of the road.
On Pine Island, just off the Florida mainland where Ian first struck, an emotional Alan Bickford said he was trying to take a longer view because what lay before him was bleak: the floors of his home were coated in stinky muck and his yard was littered with framed photos, furniture and other items he’d hauled outside.
“It’s like a death of a loved one. The pain just comes and goes,” he said. “There’s times when there are these little glimmers or slivers of hope. And then everything falls apart.”
Riding out a deadly storm amid screaming winds, pounding waves and rising waters, or escaping as danger closes in is terrifying and traumatic. Living out of a duffel bag or suitcase in an evacuation center is disruptive, stressful and depressing. Returning to a flood-ravaged home that needs to be gutted to prevent mold from taking hold or, worse, reduced to splinters and scrap metal and scattered like confetti is heartbreaking.
Mao Lin walked an hour Thursday to reach the plot of land where she had lived on Fort Myers Beach, which looked like a blast zone. She was distressed to find it gone.
“The whole street — nothing’s left,” she said. “We don’t have a home. We don’t have a car. We don’t have anything. We have nothing left.”
In recent days, the number of calls have doubled at Hatch’s organization as people recognize they cannot rebuild their lives — and overcome trauma — alone.
“The needs are going to change over time,” Hatch said. “Some people have lost everything, maybe the walls of their home may be still standing, but they’re uninhabitable.”
Cleaning up the mess of a damaged home or finding a new one in the wake of a catastrophe gives way to the longer term challenges of navigating the maze of bureaucracy for financial assistance, securing permits for rebuilding or fighting insurance companies over reimbursements.
Horney studied suicide rates in counties that experienced a disaster between 2003-2015. She and her colleagues found suicides increased 23% when comparing the three-year period preceding a disaster to the three years after an event, according to the study published in The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention.
She said the Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 suicides of men in their 70s was not typical so soon after a catastrophic event.
“It’s not usually an immediate, post-disaster thing,” Horney said. “It’s really these longer-term mental health problems that have either been exacerbated by or caused by the disaster that then over time tend to lead to more severe outcomes like suicide.”
In the aftermath of a disaster, communities pull together to recover and rebuild. Rescuers, relief workers and nonprofit organizations provide food, funding and other help, including counseling. But attention eventually fades and the money dries up. Emergency funds for mental health sometimes expire in as soon as two months and last no longer than a year.
With disasters becoming more frequent and more severe due to climate change, there could be a cumulative effect on mental health, Horney said. She said her study calls for more funding to fix the damage that is felt but can’t be seen.
Most of the emotional impacts of a disaster are short-lived but they could be worsened if followed by another cataclysmic event.
“If it was usual that symptoms would resolve in six months to a year, but then there’s another hurricane or another wildfire, then you’re in this cycle of intensifying mental health impacts,” Horney said. “The research is definitely clear that the more disasters you’re exposed to, the stronger the impacts on mental health.”
Joe Kuczko hunkered down with his parents as their Pine Island mobile home was battered by the storm. Kuczko got a gash in his foot that he stitched himself after a piece of the roof blew off.
Pieces of mangled metal lay on the ground Thursday along with containers full of possessions and clothes hung to dry as Kuczko, shirtless and with a sunburn on his back, strung up a tarp to keep the rain out of what remained of the home.
“I lost the first 30 years of my life,” he said. “Every time I hear the wind blow and a piece of aluminum shift, it’s like PTSD.”
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Melley reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press journalist Robert Bumsted contributed to this story from Pine Island, Florida.
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The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available for those in distress by dialing 988 or 1-800-273-8255.
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Hurricane Julia hit Nicaragua’s central Caribbean coast on Sunday and dumped torrential rains across Central America before an expected reemergence over the Pacific.
Julia hit as a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, though its winds had dipped to tropical storm force of 50 mph by the evening as it pushed across Nicaragua.
As of 5 p.m. ET, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said Julia was centered about 45 miles west-northwest of Managua, the capital, and was moving west at 16 mph.
It said life-threatening flash floods and mudslides were possible across Central America and southern Mexico through Tuesday, with the storm expected to bring as much as 15 inches of rain in isolated areas.
Colombia’s national disaster agency reported Sunday that Julia blew the roofs off several houses and knocked over trees as it blasted past San Andres Island east of Nicaragua. There were no immediate reports of fatalities
In Nicaragua, Vice President Rosario Murillo told TN8 television that there had been no reports of deaths so far, but power and communications were cut to some areas. She said that 9,500 people had been evacuated to shelters.
Local news media showed images of trees toppled across roads and local flooding.
Heavy rains and evacuations were also reported in Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica, where some highways were closed due to the downpours.
Guillermo González, director of Nicaragua’s Disaster Response System, told official media that people at high risk had been evacuated from coastal areas by noon Saturday. The army said it delivered humanitarian supplies to Bluefields and Laguna de Perlas for distribution to 118 temporary shelters.
The storm was forecast to emerge over the Pacific and skirt the coasts of El Salvador and Guatemala, a region already saturated by weeks of heavy rains.
In Guatemala, storms since early May had already caused at least 49 confirmed deaths, with six people missing. Roads and hundreds of homes have been damaged, Guatemalan officials say.
In El Salvador, where 19 people have died this rainy season, the worst rainfall was expected Monday and Tuesday, said Fernando López, the minister of environmental and natural resources. Officials said they had opened 61 shelters with the capacity to house more than 3,000 people.
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FORT MYERS, Fla. — Just days after Hurricane Ian struck, a crowd of locals gathered under a huge banyan tree at a motel’s outdoor tiki bar for drink specials and live music. Less than 10 miles away, crews were finishing the search for bodies on a coastal barrier island. Even closer, entire families were trying to get comfortable for the night in a mass shelter housing more than 500 storm victims.
On a coast where a few miles meant the difference between life and death, relief and ruin, the contrasting scenes of reality less than two weeks since the hurricane‘s onslaught are jarring, and they point to the way disaster can mean so many different things to different people.
Arlan Fuller has seen the disparity while working in the hurricane zone to serve marginalized communities with Project Hope, a nonprofit that provides medical relief services. A few factors seem to account for the vast differences from one place to the next, he said: People and places closest to the coast usually fared the worst, as did people with lower incomes.
“There’s an interesting combination of location, the sturdiness of the structure people lived in, and means,” said Fuller.
On Pine Island, where the state quickly erected a temporary bridge to replace one washed out by the storm, volunteers are handing out water, ice, food and supplies. The island’s Publix grocery store reopened with generator power faster than seemed possible, pleasing island resident Charlotte Smith, who didn’t evacuate.
“My home is OK. The lower level did flood somewhat. But I’m dry. They have the water back on running. Things are really getting pretty good.” Smith said.
Life is very different for Shanika Caldwell, 40, who took her nine children to a mass shelter located inside Hertz Arena, a minor league hockey coliseum, after another shelter located at a public high school shut down so classes could get ready to resume. The family was living in a motel before the storm but had to flee after the roof flew off, she said.
“If they say they are going to start school next week, how am I going to get my kids back and forth from school all the way here?” she said. Nearby, a huge silver statue of an ice hockey player looked out over the arena parking lot.
As three shrimpers watched a Sunday afternoon NFL game on a television set in the shade of a trawler that was pushed ashore by Ian, Alexa Alvarez wiped away tears as she stood in the rubble of Fort Myers Beach. She has fond memories of childhood trips with her brother and parents, who lived on the island and lost their home to the storm.
“I had to see it for myself, and just kind of say goodbye,” she said.
Ian, a strong Category 4 storm with 155 mph (249 kph) winds, was blamed for more than 100 deaths, the overwhelming majority of them in southwest Florida. It was the third-deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland this century behind Hurricane Katrina, which left about 1,400 people dead, and Hurricane Sandy, which had a total death count of 233 despite weakening to a tropical storm just before it made landfall.
For some, the recovery has been fairly quick. Barber shops, car washes, chain restaurants, a gun range and vape shops — lots of vape shops — already have reopened on U.S. 41, known in southern Florida as the Tamiami Trail. Many traffic lights are operating, yet residents of low-lying homes and mobile home parks just off the highway are still shoveling mud that was left behind by floodwaters.
In Punta Gorda, near where boutiques and investment firms do business along a tony street lined by palm trees, Judy Jones, 74, is trying to provide for more than 40 residents of the bare-bones homeless shelter she’s operated for more than five decades, Bread of Life Mission Inc.
“I take care of people that fall through the crack in the system,” she said. “You have people who were on their feet but because of the hurricane, they’re on their knees.”
Cheryl Wiese isn’t homeless: For 16 years she spent the fall and winter months in her modest mobile home on Oyster Bay Lane, located at Fort Myers Beach, before returning to a place on Lake Erie in Ohio for the summer. But what she found after making the 24-hour drive south following Ian all but ruined her.
“I don’t want to even live here anymore. There is no Fort Myers Beach. All my neighbors are gone. All my friends are gone,” she said.
The worst part, she said, might have been driving past the devastation to the public library to begin the process of applying for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A worker told her to be ready for a phone call and visit from a FEMA representative, and not to miss either, Wiese said.
“If I miss the phone call? Out of luck,” she said. “If I miss him? Out of luck.”
Danilo Mendoza, a construction worker from the Miami area whose trailer and tools were blown away by Ian, has seen the places where people are going on with life, where the recovery already is underway, but he’s doing his best to stay positive.
He counts himself fortunate because he has a safe place to stay at the hockey arena, which is located across the street from upscale apartments where people go on morning walks in athletic gear, and the food is abundant.
“I see the big picture,” he said. “They give you blankets, for God’s sake, brand new ones. They give you all the things you need to survive.”
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FORT MYERS, Fla. — Just days after Hurricane Ian struck, a crowd of locals gathered under a huge banyan tree at a motel’s outdoor tiki bar for drink specials and live music. Less than 10 miles away, crews were finishing the search for bodies on a coastal barrier island. Even closer, entire families were trying to get comfortable for the night in a mass shelter housing more than 500 storm victims.
On a coast where a few miles meant the difference between life and death, relief and ruin, the contrasting scenes of reality less than two weeks since the hurricane‘s onslaught are jarring, and they point to the way disaster can mean so many different things to different people.
Arlan Fuller has seen the disparity while working in the hurricane zone to serve marginalized communities with Project Hope, a nonprofit that provides medical relief services. A few factors seem to account for the vast differences from one place to the next, he said: People and places closest to the coast usually fared the worst, as did people with lower incomes.
“There’s an interesting combination of location, the sturdiness of the structure people lived in, and means,” said Fuller.
On Pine Island, where the state quickly erected a temporary bridge to replace one washed out by the storm, volunteers are handing out water, ice, food and supplies. The island’s Publix grocery store reopened with generator power faster than seemed possible, pleasing island resident Charlotte Smith, who didn’t evacuate.
“My home is OK. The lower level did flood somewhat. But I’m dry. They have the water back on running. Things are really getting pretty good.” Smith said.
Life is very different for Shanika Caldwell, 40, who took her nine children to a mass shelter located inside Hertz Arena, a minor league hockey coliseum, after another shelter located at a public high school shut down so classes could get ready to resume. The family was living in a motel before the storm but had to flee after the roof flew off, she said.
“If they say they are going to start school next week, how am I going to get my kids back and forth from school all the way here?” she said Saturday. Nearby, a huge silver statue of an ice hockey player looked out over the arena parking lot.
Ian, a strong Category 4 storm with 155 mph (249 kph) winds, was blamed for more than 100 deaths, the overwhelming majority of them in southwest Florida. It was the third-deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland this century behind Hurricane Katrina, which left about 1,400 people dead, and Hurricane Sandy, which had a total death count of 233 despite weakening to a tropical storm just before it made landfall.
For some, the recovery has been fairly quick. Barber shops, car washes, chain restaurants, a gun range and vape shops — lots of vape shops — already have reopened on U.S. 41, known in southern Florida as the Tamiami Trail. Many traffic lights are operating, yet residents of low-lying homes and mobile home parks just off the highway are still shoveling mud that was left behind by floodwaters.
In Punta Gorda, near where boutiques and investment firms do business along a tony street lined by palm trees, Judy Jones, 74, is trying to provide for more than 40 residents of the bare-bones homeless shelter she’s operated for more than five decades, Bread of Life Mission Inc.
“I take care of people that fall through the crack in the system,” she said. “You have people who were on their feet but because of the hurricane, they’re on their knees.”
Cheryl Wiese isn’t homeless: For 16 years she spent the fall and winter months in her modest mobile home on Oyster Bay Lane, located at Fort Myers Beach, before returning to a place on Lake Erie in Ohio for the summer. But what she found after making the 24-hour drive south following Ian all but ruined her.
“I don’t want to even live here anymore. There is no Fort Myers Beach. All my neighbors are gone. All my friends are gone,” she said.
The worst part, she said, might have been driving past the devastation to the public library to begin the process of applying for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A worker told her to be ready for a phone call and visit from a FEMA representative, and not to miss either, Wiese said.
“If I miss the phone call? Out of luck,” she said. “If I miss him? Out of luck.”
Danilo Mendoza, a construction worker from the Miami area whose trailer and tools were blown away by Ian, has seen the places where people are going on with life, where the recovery already is underway, but he’s doing his best to stay positive.
He counts himself fortunate because he has a safe place to stay at the hockey arena, which is located across the street from upscale apartments where people go on morning walks in athletic gear, and the food is abundant.
“I see the big picture,” he said. “They give you blankets, for God’s sake, brand new ones. They give you all the things you need to survive.”
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Editor’s Note: Sign up to get this weekly column as a newsletter. We’re looking back at the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the week from CNN and other outlets.
CNN
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“Can you tell me where we’re headin’?” Bob Dylan asks in his 1978 song “Señor.”
Is it “Lincoln County Road or Armageddon? Seems like I been down this way before. Is there any truth in that, señor?”
Yes, we’ve been here before, at least if you take President Joe Biden at his word. At a fundraiser in New York City Thursday, Biden said, “First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use (of a) nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going.” Referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s threat to go nuclear in his war with Ukraine, the President observed, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
As historian Julian Zelizer wrote, “Those were unsettling words for a nation to hear from the commander in chief.” Biden referred to “the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when the world seemed to teeter on the brink of nuclear war as the US and the Soviet Union faced off over missiles in Cuba.”
“Some planned escape routes from major cities while others stocked up on transistor radios, bottled water and radiation kits for their families. Although nobody knew it at the time, the danger was even greater than most thought as the leaders didn’t have full control of the situation. In the end, diplomacy won out, a deal was reached and disaster was averted.”
But the prospect of annihilating humanity in a nuclear exchange is so great that such brinksmanship should never be allowed to happen again. Surely Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were right when they agreed in 1985 that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
US national security officials privately said there was no new intelligence to indicate that Putin is moving to carry out his threat and couldn’t explain why Biden made the extraordinary statement. But its implications were clear, Zelizer argued. “This historic moment in the war between Russia and Ukraine is an important reminder that the US has let nuclear arms control fall from the agenda, and the consequences are dangerous.”
Putin’s back is against the wall as Ukraine continues to retake territory from the Russians. Peter Bergen wrote that Putin is “facing growing criticism from Russians on both the left and the right, who are taking considerable risks given the draconian penalties they can face for speaking out against his ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.”
“With even his allies expressing concern, and hundreds of thousands of citizens fleeing partial mobilization, an increasingly isolated Putin has once again taken to making rambling speeches offering his distorted view of history.”
One lesson of history is that military defeat endangers dictatorial leaders. “Putin’s gamble may lead to a third dissolution of the Russian empire, which happened first in 1917 as the First World War wound down, and again in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union,” Bergen noted. “It could unfold once more as Putin’s dream of seizing Ukraine seems to be coming to an inglorious end.”
It’s striking to recall, as Frida Ghitis did, that “seven months ago, some viewed Putin as something of a genius. That myth has turned to dust. The man who helped suppress uprisings, entered wars and tried to manipulate elections across the planet now looks cornered.”
In Ukraine, “Russia’s trajectory looks like a trail of war crimes, with hundreds of bombed hospitals, schools, civilian convoys, and mass graves filled with Ukrainians. And still Ukraine is pushing ahead, is doing very well in fact, and very possibly winning this war,” wrote Ghitis.
Biden took heat this summer for deciding to meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and walking away with little commitment from the Saudis to expand oil production. And then last week, the Saudi regime was instrumental in OPEC+’s decision to actually cut oil production in a move that benefits it and other oil-producing states including Russia.
“So much for cozying up to the Saudis – President Joe Biden’s much-hyped fist bump with Mohammed bin Salman during a trip to the Middle East back in July has turned into something of a slap across the face from the crown prince,” wrote David A. Andelman.
In the US, gasoline prices have started rising after weeks of declines, adding to the burdens Democrats face in trying to hold onto control of Congress in the midterm elections a month from now.
“The OPEC production cutbacks could – indeed, should – backfire for Saudi Arabia and its complicit partners,” wrote Andelman. “There is growing sentiment in Congress to reevaluate America’s wider relationship with Saudi Arabia and especially the vast arms sales to the kingdom.”
Higher oil prices come on top of Europe’s emerging energy crisis, with Russia sharply reducing its export of natural gas to the continent. As a result, Germany is among the nations that have instituted tough new curbs on energy use, wrote Paul Hockenos.
“Step into my Berlin office today and you’ll find everybody is wearing sweaters – I wear two, with wool socks and occasionally a scarf. … At home, my little family has sworn off baths (swift showers please), and lights are on only in the rooms we’re occupying. We’ve invested in a wool curtain inside our apartment’s front door to keep out the draft.”
“My friend Bill … hasn’t turned his heating on yet this year – no one I know has – and wears a sweater at home. He also has a new method of showering: one minute under warm water, turns it off, lathers up, and then rinses off.”
“Timing is everything,” said Garrett Hedlund in the 2011 song of that name.
“When the stars line up
And you catch a break
People think you’re lucky
But you know it’s grace…”
It works in reverse too. Just ask Linda Stewart, a New Mexico educator in her 60s who decided to retire one year into the pandemic lockdown. “Finances would be a little tight for a while, but some outside projects would supplement my income, so I felt confident I would be able to handle it,” she wrote in a new CNN Opinion series, “America’s Future Starts Now,” which explores the key issues in the midterm campaigns.
But, Stewart added, “by the end of the second year of lockdown, inflation started taking a toll and money was getting uncomfortably tight. Soon I was in the red each month, just trying to keep up. The usual suspects were groceries and gas, which meant cutting back on some of the more expensive food items and cooking meals at home.”
“I stopped driving for anything other than essentials. And with the continuing drought here in the Southwest, utility bills went through the ceiling. I cut back on watering my garden and turned the furnace down a few degrees in the winter and the air conditioning up a few in the summer. I switched to washing clothes mostly in cold water and only running the dishwasher once a week.”
The economy is the issue Americans are most concerned about, and there are no quick, easy solutions to the inflation spike. The second part of CNN Opinion’s new series was a roundup of views on how to help people cope with higher costs.
The Federal Reserve Bank is raising interest rates at a rapid pace to conquer inflation. The “tight labor market – and the rapid wage growth it has spurred – is causing inflation to become more entrenched,” wrote economist Gad Levanon for CNN Business Perspectives. To curb the rise in prices, “the Federal Reserve is likely to drive the economy into a recession in 2023, crushing continued job growth.”
At least 131 people have died due to Hurricane Ian. Why was it so deadly?
The storm’s course veered south as it approached Florida and rapidly intensified, Cara Cuite and Rebecca Morss noted. “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 less than the amount of time outlined in Lee County’s own emergency management plan.”
“While the lack of sufficient time to evacuate was cited by some as a reason why they stayed behind, there are other factors that may also have suppressed evacuations in some of the hardest hit areas.” Few people are aware of their evacuation zone, and some websites carrying that information crashed in the leadup to the storm’s arrival, Cuite and Morss wrote.
“People need time to decide what to do, pack belongings, find a place to go and arrange how to get there, often in the midst of heavy traffic and other complications and obstacles.” Other factors: “In addition to a false sense of security from prior near-misses among some residents, others who were in the areas of Florida hardest hit by Hurricane Ian may not have had any personal experience with such powerful storms. This is likely true for the millions of people who have moved to Florida over the past few decades…”
For more:
Adam H. Sobel: Where the hurricane risk is growing
Geoff Duncan, a Republican and the current lieutenant governor of Georgia, is unsure about Herschel Walker’s prospects in the upcoming election. The Republican Senate candidate has denied reports alleging he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion in 2009.
“The October surprise,” Duncan wrote, “has upended the political landscape, throwing one of the nation’s closest midterm races into turmoil five weeks before Election Day, but it never had to be this way. Just as there should not be two Democrats representing a center-right state like Georgia in the US Senate, the Republican Party should not have found its chance of regaining a Senate majority hanging on an untested and unproven first-time candidate.”
“Walker won his Senate primary not because of his political chops or policy proposals. He trounced his opponents because of his performance on the football field 40 years ago and his friendship with former President Donald Trump – neither of which are guaranteed tickets to victory anymore.”
For more on politics:
SE Cupp: Herschel Walker’s ‘October Surprise’ won’t matter
Tim Kane: What the Biden administration is getting wrong on immigration
Nicole Hemmer: The Onion is right about the future of democracy
Dean Obeidallah: The single-minded goal of Trump-loving Republicans
Organic chemistry is a famously difficult course and a traditional prerequisite for students who want to go on to medical school. Maitland Jones Jr., a master of the field and textbook author, taught the course at NYU – until 82 of the 350 students taking it “signed a petition because, they said, their low scores demonstrated that his class was too hard,” Jill Filipovic noted.
Then the university fired him.
An NYU spokesman “told the (New York) Times in defense of their decision to terminate Jones’s contract that the professor had been the target of complaints about ‘dismissiveness, unresponsiveness, condescension and opacity about grading.’ It’s worth noting that according to the Times, students expressed surprise that Jones was fired, which their petition did not call for.”
Some of the student complaints may have been valid, noted Filipovic, but she added that the case “raises important questions, chief among them how much power students, who universities seem to increasingly think of as consumers (and some of whom think of themselves that way), should have in the hiring, retention and firing of professors…”
“There are real consequences … to making higher education primarily palatable to those paying tuition bills – particularly when it comes to courses like organic chemistry, which are intended to be difficult. Future medical students do in fact need a rigorous science background in order to be successful doctors someday. Whether or not Jones was an effective teacher for aspiring medical students is up for debate, but in firing him, NYU is effectively dodging questions about the line between academic rigor and student well-being with potentially life-and-death matters at stake.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission fined Kim Kardashian nearly $1.3 million for failing to disclose she was paid to promote a crypto asset, EthereumMax, noted Emily Parker.
“This case reflects a much larger problem in the crypto industry: Celebrities are using their influence to promote cryptocurrencies, a notoriously complex and risky asset class, which can lead people to invest in coins or projects that they may not understand,” Parker observed.
“New coins and projects are constantly popping up, sometimes without sufficient warnings about the risks of investing … In such a fast-changing and confusing market, how do you distinguish winners from losers? It’s easy to imagine how a confident tweet by a celebrity could have a significant impact on a new investor.”
In agreeing to the fine, Kardashian “did a favor for the cryptocurrency industry. Such a high-profile example could cause other celebrities to think twice before shilling a token on social media.”
Alejandro Mayorkas: The security risk Congress needs to take seriously
Danae Wolfe: Stomping alone won’t wipe out the spotted lanternfly
Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza: Inside the prison where sunlight ceases to exist
Jeremi Suri and William Inboden: A generation of the world’s best leaders has died
Sara Stewart: ‘Dahmer’ debate is finally saying the quiet part about true crime out loud
Elisa Massimino: It’s time to shut down Guantanamo
Pete Brown: What ‘fancy a pint?’ really means
AND…
Until recently, the late-night television formula ruled, as Bill Carter noted. “On the air after 11 p.m. with a charismatic host, some comedy, a desk, a guest or two, maybe a band and then ‘Good night, everybody!’” Late-night shows seemed to be holding their own despite the rise of cord-cutting and the move to streaming.
But that’s changing, as Trevor Noah’s decision to give up hosting “The Daily Show” suggested. Carter wrote, “What many people watch now is not television: It’s whatever-vision, entertainment by any means on any device. What’s on late night is now often seen on subscriptions – and not late at night.”
Noah is leaving on a high note “after a seven-year run, marked by an impressive body of comedy work and growing acclaim,” Carter observed. In succeeding Jon Stewart as the show’s host, Noah “had a different beat in his head from the start. He wanted to refashion the show with a wider comedy vision, one looking more out at the world, instead of purely in at the United States, all informed by Noah’s South African-born global perspective.”
“It was a wise choice. Following Stewart was always going to be a potentially crippling challenge. Noah took it on and remade the show to his own specifications. One major sign of that was how strikingly diverse the show became.”
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MEXICO CITY — Hurricane Julia bore down on Nicaragua’s central Caribbean coast early Sunday after lashing Colombia’s San Andres island in a close pass-by hours earlier.
Julia started Saturday as a tropical storm, but gained power most of the day and became a Category 1 hurricane shortly before it veered slightly south of San Andres island in the early evening.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Julia’s maximum sustained winds had stabilized around 75 mph (120 kph) late Saturday. It was centered about 80 miles (130 kilometers) east-northeast of Bluefields, Nicaragua, and was moving west at 16 mph (26 kph), with landfall on the Nicaraguan coast expected before dawn.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro had declared a “maximum alert” on San Andres as well as Providencia island to the north and asked hotels to prepare space to shelter the vulnerable population. Officials on San Andres imposed a curfew for residents at 6 a.m. Saturday to limit people in the streets. Air operations to the islands were suspended.
There were no early reports on what effects the storm had in San Andres.
In Nicaragua, authorities issued an alert for all types of vessels to seek safe harbor as the hurricane followed a general path toward the area of Bluefields and Laguna de Perlas.
Guillermo González, director of Nicaragua’s Disaster Response System, told official media that people at high risk had been evacuated from coastal areas by noon Saturday. The army said it delivered humanitarian supplies to Bluefields and Laguna de Perlas for distribution to 118 temporary shelters.
In Bluefields, however, life appeared little changed Saturday night, and people expressed reluctance to leave their homes.
Forecasters said a greater threat than Julia’s winds were rains of 5 to 10 inches (13 to 25 centimeters) — up to 15 inches (38 centimeters) in isolated areas — that the storm was expected to dump across Central America.
“This rainfall may cause life-threatening flash floods and mudslides through this weekend,” the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The storm’s remnants were forecast to sweep across Nicaragua and then skirt along the Pacific coasts of El Salvador and Guatemala, a region already saturated by weeks of heavy rains.
In Guatemala, officials said Julia could drench 10 departments in the east, center and west of the country — an area that has been most affected by this rainy season and where the poorest people are concentrated.
From May to September, storms have caused 49 confirmed deaths and six people are missing. Roads and hundreds of homes have been damaged, Guatemalan officials say.
In El Salvador, where 19 people have died this rainy season, the worst rainfall is expected Monday and Tuesday, said Fernando López, the minister of environmenta and natural resources. Officials said they had opened 61 shelters with the capacity to house more than 3,000 people.
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FORT MYERS, Fla. — Residents were allowed to return to a coastal island that was decimated by Hurricane Ian on Saturday with a warning from the governor that the disaster isn’t over.
Many of the homes still standing on Estero Island lack basic services, so portable restrooms, hand-washing stations, shower trailers and other essentials were trucked in for residents who want to stay, Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference. Debris still has to be removed before rebuilding can begin.
“There’s a lot more to do, and really some of the hardest stuff is still ahead of us,” DeSantis said.
While residents were initially allowed back on the island after the storm, officials shut down access to allow teams to finish searching the wreckage building by building for possible victims. Once the work was done, residents lined up and were allowed to return on buses.
Shana Dam went to see what was left of her parents’ house.
“It’s gone,” she told the Fort Myers News-Press. “It’s just gone.”
Just getting around the island, home to most of Fort Myers Beach, is difficult because of storm debris, but heavy equipment was used to clear roads.
With handmade signs all over the area warning that looters will be shot by homeowners, Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno said only nine such theft cases had been reported.
Ian, a high-end Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph (249 kph) at landfall, was the third-deadliest storm to hit the mainland United States this century behind Hurricane Katrina, which left about 1,400 people dead, and Hurricane Sandy, which had a total death count of 233 despite weakening to a tropical storm just before it made U.S. landfall.
State officials have reported 94 storm-related deaths in Florida so far and most were in Lee County, which includes the Fort Myers area and nearby Gulf Coast islands including Estero.
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MEXICO CITY — Tropical Storm Julia gained more strength moving westward in the southern Caribbean on Saturday as authorities prepared for a possible hurricane on Colombian islands and in Nicaragua.
Julia’s maximum sustained winds had increased to 70 mph (110 kph) Saturday afternoon, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The storm was centered about 55 miles (90 kilometers) east of Providencia Island and moving west at 17 mph (28 kph).
Julia was forecast to pass near or over Colombia’s San Andres and Providencia islands Saturday night on its way to landfall in Nicaragua on Sunday morning.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro declared a “maximum alert” on the islands and asked hotels to prepare space to shelter the vulnerable population. Officials on San Andres imposed a curfew for residents at 6 a.m. Saturday to limit people in the streets. Air operations to the islands were suspended.
Similar precautions were underway in the central area of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, where authorities issued an alert for all types of vessels to seek safe harbor.
Nicaraguan soldiers began preparing the evacuation of inhabitants of islands and cays around the town of Sandy Bay Sirpi. The army said it delivered humanitarian supplies to the municipalities of Bluefields and Laguna de Perlas for distribution to 118 temporary shelters.
Forecasters said a greater threat than Julia’s winds were rains of 5 to 10 inches (13 to 25 centimeters) — up to 15 inches (38 centimeters) in isolated areas — that the storm was expected to dump across Central America.
“This rainfall may cause life-threatening flash floods and mudslides through this weekend,” the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
The storm’s remnants were forecast to sweep across Nicaragua and then skirt by the Pacific coasts of El Salvador and Guatemala, a region already saturated by weeks of heavy rains.
In Guatemala, officials said Julia could drench 10 departments in the east, center and west of the country — an area that has been most affected by this rainy season and where the poorest people are concentrated.
From May to September, storms have caused 49 confirmed deaths and six people are missing. Roads and hundreds of homes have been damaged, Guatemalan officials say.
In El Salvador, where 19 people have died this rainy season, the worst rainfall is expected Monday and Tuesday, said Fernando López, the minister of environmenta and natural resources. Officials said they had opened 61 shelters with the capacity to house more than 3,000 people.
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FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) — Older people with limited mobility and those with chronic health conditions requiring the use of electrically powered medical devices were especially vulnerable when Hurricane Ian slammed into Southwest Florida, and experts warn such risks to society’s oldest are growing as disasters increase with the impact of climate change.
Almost all of the dozens of people killed by Ian in hardest hit Lee County were 50 or older, with many in their 70s, 80s and even 90s. That’s highlighted the rising dangers for those least likely to be able to flee such disasters and those most likely to be impacted by the aftermath.
Climate change makes hurricanes wetter and more powerful, but it also increases the frequency of heat waves like ones that scorched the Pacific Northwest the last two summers, killing scores of mostly aged people. It’s also intensified drought fueled wildfires like the inferno that incinerated the California town of Paradise in 2018, killing 85 people, again mostly older.
“It’s not terribly surprising that physically frail, socially isolated people are the most likely to die in these events. But it is politically significant,” said New York University sociology professor Eric Klinenberg. “If we know people are at risk, why aren’t we doing more to help them?”
Klinenberg, who wrote the book “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago” about extreme heat that killed more than 700 mostly older and Black people in July 1991, called Ian a mere preview.
“We saw this happen in Chicago, in (Hurricane) Katrina, in (Superstorm) Sandy, and we are going to see more and more as the globe becomes increasingly hotter,” he said.
Florida in particular will feel the increased impact of climate-fueled disasters, sitting in the path of many Atlantic storms and with a large share of retirees drawn by warm weather, a vast coastline and relatively cheap housing. About 29% of Lee County’s population is 65 and older.
One of the more dramatic stories of Ian demonstrates the risks. Johnny Lauder’s 86-year-old mother Karen Lauder, who uses a wheelchair, initially refused to evacuate. But as the water inside her home began to rise nearly above her head, she was unable to flee and her son had to come rescue her in an ordeal he documented.
The extreme dangers some face when they lose power was especially clear in Lee County, where an 89-year-old man died after the electricity he needed for his oxygen went out and then his backup generator failed.
Florida has attempted to address some of these issues by setting up shelters where people with health conditions that require electricity for oxygen, dialysis and devices like ventilators can preregister to stay.
AARP Florida Director Jeff Johnson praised the special shelters, saying the state’s county emergency management agencies had modernized and improved evacuation operations the past two decades.
“There is room for improvement, but it would be wrong to say they aren’t doing anything,” he said.
Home-based networks that deliver care and services to older people, as well as neighborhood associations and faith communities can also help by checking on socially isolated older people, Johnson said.
Several hurricane survivors sat in wheelchairs Thursday outside one special shelter set up at an elementary school in Fort Myers.
Merrill Bauchert, 60, was staying there because Ian destroyed his home and he needs electricity for the CPAP machine he uses for severe sleep apnea.
Bauchert said dozens of residents from a senior living facility were staying there, many of them with mobility problems or dependent on electrical medical devices to stay alive.
Large oxygen tanks were used at first for people with breathing problems, he said, but those were later replaced with mechanical oxygen generators for individual use. Conditions have improved with restored water service, but the early days were tough, Bauchert said.
With many people too frail to go outside and no sewer service inside, using the restroom involved putting a plastic bag in a toilet and sitting down, sometimes with help.
“You were actually doing your business in a trash bag. Take the trash bag, tie it in a knot, throw it in the trash can and put another bag in for the next person,” he said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has recognized the disproportionate effect Ian had on the state’s older residents, and the need for local groups to help their recovery.
“It hit in areas that have a lot of elderly residents, and I’ve met a lot of the folks,” DeSantis said at a news conference Thursday. “So you’re somebody who’s maybe 85 years old. You may not be able to do the same home repair that you used to be able to do when you were younger.”
While the death toll of over 100 and property damage from Ian was catastrophic, Hurricane Katrina caused far more deaths and destruction in August 2005.
Researchers have concluded that nearly half of those killed by Katrina in Louisiana were 75 or older. A 2006 Senate Committee report noted a failure by all levels of government to effectively evacuate thousands of older, sick and disabled people from New Orleans as neighbors with cars fled the city.
Older people are also at risk from heat in the days and weeks after major storms.
After Hurricane Ida slammed Louisiana in 2021, of nine New Orleans residents killed by heat and 10 for whom heat was a contributing cause of death, only four — two in each group — were under the age of 60, according to information provided by the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office.
The aftereffects of Hurricane Irma in 2017 took an especially large toll. The direct impacts of the storm killed more than 90 people in the U.S., but researchers at the University of South Florida and Brown University found 433 additional residents at Florida nursing homes died within 90 days of the storm, compared to the same period in 2015, when there were no hurricanes.
The study was prompted by the heat-related deaths of 12 residents at a Broward County nursing home that occurred when the storm knocked out air conditioning and staff didn’t move them to another facility. An administrator and three nurses were later charged.
Klinenberg, the sociologist who wrote about the Chicago heat deaths, said the fault lies in in how society cares for its elders not only during disasters, but daily.
“We live in an aging society and in a way we are victims of our own success,” he said. “Europe has the same problem. Also Japan and Korea. People are living decades longer because of medical science, but we don’t know how to care for them.”
Snow reported from Phoenix. Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans contributed reporting.
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CNN
—
Just weeks after Ron DeSantis made a very public display of his efforts to keep migrants from coming to Florida, Hurricane Ian’s destruction is drawing a growing number of immigrants to the Republican governor’s state.
“They’re arriving from New York, from Louisiana, from Houston and Dallas,” says Saket Soni, executive director of the nonprofit Resilience Force, which advocates for thousands of disaster response workers. The group is made up largely of immigrants, many of whom are undocumented, Soni says. Much like migrant workers who follow harvest seasons and travel from farm to farm, Soni says these workers crisscross the US to help clean up and rebuild when disaster strikes.
To describe their work, he likes to use a metaphor he says a Mexican roofer once shared with him.
“What you have now is basically immigrants who are sort of traveling white blood cells of America, who congregate after hurricanes to heal a place, and then move on to heal the next place,” Soni says.
Already, Soni says his team has been in the Fort Myers area with hundreds of immigrant workers – about half of whom came from out of state. And he says more will arrive in the coming weeks.
He calls it a “moment of interdependence.” And he says it’s something he hopes DeSantis and others in Florida will recognize.
“Many who were traveling in the opposite direction weeks ago are now traveling to Florida to help rebuild,” he says.
And each morning when they wake up, he says, many migrants have told him they are praying for DeSantis.
“They’re praying for him to lead a good recovery, they’re praying for him to be the best governor he can be. Because they need him and he needs them. And they know that,” Soni says.
Does DeSantis?
“There’s no way that he doesn’t,” Soni says.
But so far, the Florida governor’s words and actions tell a different story.
Back in 2018, DeSantis campaigned for governor with a TV ad showing him teaching his kids to build a wall. And since then, he’s positioned himself as one of the most vocal critics of the Biden administration’s immigration policies and announced high-profile immigration steps of his own, including – most recently – using state funds for two flights taking migrants from Texas to Florida to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Word that immigrants are now coming to help clean up some of his state’s most storm-ravaged communities hasn’t softened the governor’s stance.
Several minutes into a news conference Tuesday billed as an update on the state’s hurricane response – before he detailed ongoing rescue efforts – DeSantis made a point of trumpeting that three “illegal aliens” were among four people recently arrested on looting allegations.
“These are people that are foreigners, they’re illegally in our country, and not only that, they try to loot and ransack in the aftermath of a natural disaster. I mean, they should be prosecuted, but they need to be sent back to their home countries. They should not be here at all,” he told reporters.
Later in the news conference, CNN’s Boris Sanchez asked DeSantis whether he had any response to reports that Venezuelans in New York were being recruited to work on recovery efforts, and whether the governor would also be trying to send those migrants back north.
DeSantis doubled down on his earlier message.
“First of all, our program that we did is a voluntary relocation program. I don’t have the authority to forcibly relocate people. If I could, I’d take those three looters, I’d drag them out by their collars, and I’d send them back to where they came from,” the governor said, drawing applause from officials surrounding him.
He went on to describe a funeral he attended this week of a Pinellas County sheriff’s deputy who was killed in a hit and run by a front-end loader that authorities allege was driven by an undocumented Honduran immigrant.
Then he ended the news conference, making no mention of immigrant workers who were putting tarps on roofs or clearing debris.
Hurricane Ian is the first major hurricane to hit Florida since DeSantis took office in January 2019.
Many migrants coming now to help rebuild, Soni says, have responded in the past to numerous major disasters in Florida and across the country.
“Many are from Venezuela. Many are from Honduras and Mexico. They represent all of the different waves of migrants that have been arriving into the US and into this industry. Many of them who I’ve known since Hurricane Katrina and who have a dozen hurricanes under their belt,” he said. “But there are also newer migrants. I just met a group of Venezuelan asylum-seekers who were arriving to do the work.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History notes in its description of an artifact in its collection that after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, “Many homeowners undertook their own clean-up, but much was performed by immigrant laborers attracted to the region by the promise of hard work and good wages.”
Sergio Chávez, an associate professor of sociology at Rice University who studies Mexican roofers, describes Katrina as a “key moment” that shaped the identities and careers of many of the hundreds of men he’s interviewed.
A little more than half of the roofers in the group he’s studied are undocumented immigrants, Chávez says. And when he’s spoken with roofers across the United States – based in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio and Kentucky – Chávez says a common detail quickly emerges when he asks how they ended up in those locations.
“They always name a storm,” he says.
After Hurricane Ian, he says, many of those roofers are poised to head to Florida. Deciding exactly when to go to a disaster zone is a strategic decision, Chávez says, noting that arriving too early can be problematic.
“There’s no telephone service, gasoline, food, housing,” he says. “They also have to be really careful not to just work for anybody, because otherwise they may not get compensated for the work that they do.”
But there’s no doubt they’re going to Florida, he says, and that they’ll play a key role in the state’s recovery.
“DeSantis is not scaring them away,” Chávez says.
That doesn’t mean they won’t face some hostility once they get there, just like they have in other communities.
“My guys for the most part do experience ‘the look.’ They do get pulled over, maybe. But for the most part, any time they go to a lot of these different locations, they are there to do work which the local population sees as essential. So they get their work done,” Chávez says.
On the ground in communities, Chávez says he’s seen contradictions between people’s political beliefs and their actions. Some may support anti-immigrant rhetoric, he says, but then look the other way when they need certain services that immigrant workers provide.
A bigger problem, Chávez says, is that when these workers face abuses – like wage theft or unsafe housing conditions – there aren’t enough laws to protect them, or local authorities may be hesitant to enforce them.
On top of that, the work is physically demanding and risky.
“These guys are helping us to adapt to a new world that we live in and we need their labor,” Chávez says. “But it turns out they actually risk their bodies. (Roofing is) one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States.”
Chávez says he’s spoken with many roofers about on-the-job injuries.
“A lot of these guys have fallen and they don’t have access to health insurance. Their bodies are no longer the same. They have bad knees, bad backs,” he says.
So why do roofers and other disaster recovery workers keep setting out for these destinations, storm after storm?
Even though wage theft is a major problem some face, there’s the potential to earn good wages, send their earnings to families in their home country and possibly advance to higher-paying jobs over time, Chávez says. So it’s a choice that makes economic sense to many, despite the risks.
Desperation is also a factor, Soni says.
“Part of what’s happened is because this is such dirty, dangerous work, and the conditions are so harsh, the most desperate people – those with no other economic avenues, those who are willing to be transient for a year or more – are the ones who join,” he says.
When it comes to the physical and economic risks, Soni says Resilience Force does what it can to protect workers by helping them negotiate fair wages and payment with contractors, and making sure they have the right safety equipment as they set out to rebuild homes and schools.
But those aren’t the only construction projects they’ll be working on in Florida, Soni says.
“We also try to rebuild a society that’s better than it was before the storm,” he says. “And it’s better when there are more relationships and there are more bonds between different people. … Politics can change when the people in a place change their minds.”
After previous hurricanes, he says, the organization has led workers on service projects rebuilding uninsured homes, then hosted meals where homeowners and workers can talk with the help of interpreters.
“Those bonds have lasted. People have become friends and people have changed their minds,” he says. “What that often looks like in Florida or Louisiana is for someone who thought immigration was their most important issue, well, after a hurricane, immigration becomes the 35th most important issue. And what’s more important is, how are we going to stay in this place to survive and thrive again? Who will it take? What family will it take to bring this place back? And that family usually includes the immigrants who helped rebuild the place.”
DeSantis may not take note of this. But as Florida rebuilds, Soni is betting that community leaders and homeowners who need help will.
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Latronia Latson said she feels like she has been neglected in the recovery efforts from Hurricane Ian.
Latson, who lives in the Dunbar neighborhood in Fort Myers, Florida, said she can’t get to a relief center to get bottled water and other necessities being distributed because she doesn’t have transportation; the bus system is not running in her neighborhood. Her stove and microwave also mysteriously stopped working after the hurricane, despite power being restored.
Latson said the more affluent, predominately White communities seem to be getting prioritized in the storm recovery.
“They need to make it convenient for those that don’t have transportation,” said Latson, who is disabled. “We just don’t get the same service (as people in other parts of town).”
Latson is among the residents and community leaders in Florida who say the poor, majority Black neighborhoods of Dunbar and River Park in Naples are forgotten as rescue and relief teams descend on the areas hit by Hurricane Ian last week.
The residents say they were among the last to get their power restored and shelters and relief centers are being set up too far away for people who don’t have access to vehicles.
Officials in Fort Myers did not immediately provide a response to these concerns when contacted by CNN.
The city of Naples released a statement on Thursday outlining its efforts to assist the River Park community since the storm. The statement said officials opened a comfort center at the River Park Community Center on Sept. 29 that provided access to phone charging, air conditioning, water, ice and restrooms. Additionally the city said staff members visited River Park to speak with residents, developed a plan for debris removal, transported residents to shelters and partnered with local groups to serve and deliver hot meals, water and clothing to the community.
Yet Black residents’ complaints and questions about the warnings and response lay bare the racial disparities in natural disaster recovery each time a major storm affects part of the country. Several studies found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency provides less aid to people of color facing disaster relief compared to White people. Poor communities and communities of color are also often built in locations that are more physically vulnerable to extreme weather events and have less investment in their infrastructure, experts say.
Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged the inequity when she spoke last week at the National Committee Women’s Leadership Forum.
“It is our lowest-income communities and our communities of color that are most impacted by these extreme conditions and impacted by issues that are not of their own making,” Harris said. “And so we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.”
Deanne Criswell, FEMA administrator, agreed that there are barriers to receiving federal resources. Criswell said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” earlier this week that her office is working to create more equitable access to FEMA’s disaster relief programs.
“One of our focus areas since I’ve been in office is to make sure that we’re removing those barriers,” Criswell said. “So these people that need our help the most are going to be able to access the help that we offer.”
Black activists and residents in Florida are pleading for more help from officials.
Vincent Keeys, president of the Collier County NAACP, said residents in River Park were already more vulnerable because it is a coastal community. The city of Naples, Keeys said, has worked to gentrify the area in recent years but has not built a sea wall that could provide more protection during hurricanes.
Some residents complained that they never even received a notification to evacuate their homes ahead of the storm, Keeys said.
The timing of evacuation orders has been a point of contention for Florida officials since the storm. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said officials in Lee County, where Dunbar sits, acted appropriately when they issued their first mandatory evacuations less than 24 hours before Hurricane Ian made landfall on the state, and a day after several neighboring counties issued their orders. Lee County officials have faced mounting questions about why the first mandatory evacuations weren’t ordered until a day before Ian’s landfall – despite an emergency plan that suggests evacuations should have happened earlier.
The city of Naples said in its statement Thursday that it issued mandatory evacuation notices to residents via email, the CodeRed system, social media and a press release sent to media outlets.
In River Park, many homes suffered 4 to 6 feet of flooding, downed trees and structural damage. Keeys said there are no shelters in close proximity to the neighborhood, leaving residents with nowhere to go if their homes are uninhabitable.
“Please, you cannot put our people in a flood prone situation and expect them to survive,” Keeys said. “At least, if humanly possible, help us improve, plan and make things better for human beings.”
Sharda Williams, of River Park, said she never received an evacuation order but people in nearby communities were told to leave. “No one came to our neighborhood and told us to get out,” Williams said. “Not one person.”
Now Williams said all she can do is “sit and wait until the help comes through.”
“You try and do what you can and that’s why, you know, we’re all pitching together and trying to help each other with what we can,” she said.
Curtis Williams (no relation to Sharda), another River Park resident, was also frustrated he didn’t get an evacuation order.
“Not one city employee, police or whatever, came through the neighborhood before the flood water and said there was a mandatory evacuation, not one,” he said. “They could have easily rode down here with a bullhorn, before the storm, and say ‘you people need to vacate.’ They didn’t do that.”
However, Naples said in its statement that the city’s first responders were trapped and its fire station was flooded. As a result, the North Collier Fire Rescue (NCFR) team responded to the River Park community with the high water vehicle. NCFR drove three vehicle loads of residents to high ground, which was at the Coastland Center Mall. Numerous people in the area were trapped and the city said its goal was to get everyone to safety and high ground.
More than 100 miles away in Dunbar, one pastor said while the Black community hasn’t received much support from officials, residents are leaning on each other to get through the recovery.
“We are trying to give some moral support, you know, with our neighbors and friends,” said Pastor Nicles Emile of Galilee Baptist Church. “We are working on helping our neighbors as much as we can and I can say that whatever we have and share with them.”
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As Hurricane Ian bore down on Florida, normally reliable computer forecast models couldn’t agree on where the killer storm would land. But government meteorologists are now figuring out what went wrong — and right.
Much of the forecasting variation seems to be rooted in cool Canadian air that had weakened a batch of sunny weather over the East Coast. That weakening would allow Ian to turn eastward to Southwest Florida instead of north and west to the Panhandle hundreds of miles away.
The major American computer forecast model — one of several used by forecasters — missed that and the error was “critical,” a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration postmortem of computer forecast models determined Thursday.
“It’s pretty clear that error is very consequential,” said former NOAA chief scientist Ryan Maue, now a private meteorologist who wasn’t part of NOAA’s postmortem.
Still, meteorologists didn’t miss overall with their official Hurricane Ian forecast. Ian’s eventual southwestern Florida landfall was always within the “cone of uncertainty” of the National Hurricane Center’s forecast track, although at times it was on the farthest edge.
But it wasn’t that simple. Computer forecast models, which weeks earlier had agreed on where Hurricane Fiona was going, were hundreds of miles apart as Ian chugged through the Caribbean.
The normally reliable American computer model, which had performed better than any other model in 2021 and was doing well earlier in the year, kept forecasting a Florida Panhandle landfall while the European model — long a favorite of many meteorologists — and the British simulation were pointing to Tampa or farther south.
Trying to avoid what meteorologists call the dreaded “windshield wiper effect” of dramatic hurricane path shifts, the official NOAA forecast stayed somewhere in between. Tampa — with lots of people and land vulnerable to gigantic storm surges — seemed to be the center of possible landfalls, or even worse just south of the eye so it would get the biggest surge.
Although people’s fears focused on Tampa, Ian didn’t.
The storm made landfall 89 miles (143 kilometers) to the south in Cayo Costa. For a large storm, that’s not a big difference and is within the 100-mile (161-kilometer) error bar NOAA sets. But because Tampa was north of the nasty right-side of the hurricane eye, it was spared the biggest storm surge and rainfall.
People wondered why the worst didn’t happen. There are meteorological, computer and communications reasons.
Overall, the European computer model performed best, the British one had the closest eventual Florida landfall but was too slow in timing and the American model had the highest errors when it came to track, NOAA’s Alicia Bentley said during the agency’s postmortem. But the American model was the best at getting Ian’s strength right, she said.
University of Albany meteorology professor Brian Tang said he calculated the American model’s average track error during Ian at 325 miles (520 kilometers) five-days out, while the European model was closer to 220 miles (350 kilometers).
“A lot of what we notice in the public is when there are big misses and those big misses affect people in populated areas,” Tang said in an interview.
Although this is technically not a miss, people who evacuated Tampa may think it is because the Fort Myers area got the brunt of the storm.
In some ways people are spoiled because the average track error in hurricane forecasts have gotten so much better. The three-day official forecast error was cut nearly in half over the last 10 years from 172 miles (278 kilometers) to 92 miles (148 kilometers), Tang said.
For years meteorologists touted the European model as better, because it uses more observations, is more complex but also takes longer to run and comes out later than the American one, Tang said. The American model has improved after a big boost of NOAA spending, but so has the European one, he added.
The models use a similar physics formula to simulate what happens in the atmosphere. They usually rely on the same observations, more or less. But where they differ is how all those observations are put into the computer models, what kind of uncertainties are added and the timing of when the simulation starts, said University of Miami’s Brian McNoldy.
“You are guaranteed to end up differently,” McNoldy said.
It’s not a problem if the models show similar tracks. But if they are widely different, as during Ian, “that makes you nervous,” he said.
People wrongly focus on funnel-like cone for where the hurricane is forecast to go instead of what it will do in specific locations, said MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel. And in the cone people only pay attention to the middle line not the broader picture, so Emanuel and McNoldy want the line dropped.
Another problem meteorologists say is that the cone is only where the storm is supposed to be with a 100-mile (161-kilometer) error radius, but when storms are big like Ian, their impacts of rain, surge and high wind will easily hit outside the cone.
“The cone was never intended to convey the actual impacts. It was only intended to convey the tracks,” said Gina Eosco, who heads a NOAA social science program that tries to improve storm communications.
So for the first time, NOAA surveyed Florida, Georgia and South Carolina residents before Ian hit and will follow up after to see what risks the public perceived from the media and government information. That will help the agency decide if it has to change its warning messaging, Eosco said.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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While towns across Florida and the Carolinas are cleaning up in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian and the death toll climbs, several high-profile climate change skeptics are questioning the connection between the hurricane and human-caused climate change.
“Blaming any one individual hurricane on man-made climate change is just the absolute height of absurdity,” tweeted conservative pundit Matt Walsh, in a post that was shared over 20,000 times. In another tweet posted on October 3rd, climate skeptic Peter Clack (whose claim has been the subject of a previous fact check) says, “A hurricane is not climate change. Nor is rainfall, storms or winter snow. They are all just the the weather. This concept of weather has been hijacked by a global warming frenzy, that has been relentless for 33 years. We must see a return to common sense.”
Scientists concede that any direct links between climate change and one weather event are difficult to prove. However, the consensus is that these extreme weather events are being exacerbated by climate change, making them more intense. Therefore, this claim is rated “half true.”
“It is true that climate change does not cause hurricanes,” says Andrew Dessler, director of Texas Center for Climate Studies and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M, “However, we can say with very high confidence that the hurricane was more destructive due to climate change.”
Hurricane Ian dumped an enormous amount of rain on parts of Florida. Radar estimates and ground observation rainfall shows well-over one foot of rain fell in just 12-24 hours across a swath of the region. In some of the hardest-hit areas such as Placida and Lake Wales, this exceeds the rainfall rates for 1-in-1,000 year flood events, according to NOAA data.
“We are 100% sure that the storm surge was more damaging because it was riding on a higher sea level,” adds Dessler, “We are very confident that global warming is also causing more rainfall from hurricanes because warmer air holds more water. Finally, we have some confidence that climate change is increasing the intensity of hurricanes, so this hurricane may have had stronger winds than it would otherwise have had.”
“You need to look at trends,” warns Kim Prather, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry at University of California, San Diego. “And there is definitely an increase in the number of major weather related disasters occurring over recent decades.”
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While towns across Florida and the Carolinas are cleaning up in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian and the death toll climbs, several high-profile climate change skeptics are questioning the connection between the hurricane and human-caused climate change.
“Blaming any one individual hurricane on man-made climate change is just the absolute height of absurdity,” tweeted conservative pundit Matt Walsh, in a post that was shared over 20,000 times. In another tweet posted on October 3rd, climate skeptic Peter Clack (whose claim has been the subject of a previous fact check) says, “A hurricane is not climate change. Nor is rainfall, storms or winter snow. They are all just the the weather. This concept of weather has been hijacked by a global warming frenzy, that has been relentless for 33 years. We must see a return to common sense.”
Scientists concede that any direct links between climate change and one weather event are difficult to prove. However, the consensus is that these extreme weather events are being exacerbated by climate change, making them more intense. Therefore, this claim is rated “half true.”
“It is true that climate change does not cause hurricanes,” says Andrew Dessler, director of Texas Center for Climate Studies and professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M, “However, we can say with very high confidence that the hurricane was more destructive due to climate change.”
Hurricane Ian dumped an enormous amount of rain on parts of Florida. Radar estimates and ground observation rainfall shows well-over one foot of rain fell in just 12-24 hours across a swath of the region. In some of the hardest-hit areas such as Placida and Lake Wales, this exceeds the rainfall rates for 1-in-1,000 year flood events, according to NOAA data.
“We are 100% sure that the storm surge was more damaging because it was riding on a higher sea level,” adds Dessler, “We are very confident that global warming is also causing more rainfall from hurricanes because warmer air holds more water. Finally, we have some confidence that climate change is increasing the intensity of hurricanes, so this hurricane may have had stronger winds than it would otherwise have had.”
“You need to look at trends,” warns Kim Prather, Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry at University of California, San Diego. “And there is definitely an increase in the number of major weather related disasters occurring over recent decades.”
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