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Tag: Tropical cyclones

  • Ian leaves scenes of recovery, despair on Florida coast

    Ian leaves scenes of recovery, despair on Florida coast

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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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  • Hurricane Julia bears down on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast

    Hurricane Julia bears down on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast

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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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  • Residents allowed to return to Florida island slammed by Ian

    Residents allowed to return to Florida island slammed by Ian

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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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  • Tropical Storm Julia strengthens as it heads for Nicaragua

    Tropical Storm Julia strengthens as it heads for Nicaragua

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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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  • AP EXPLAINS: How one computer forecast model botched Ian

    AP EXPLAINS: How one computer forecast model botched Ian

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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 AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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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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  • Hurricane Ian floods leave mess, insurance questions behind

    Hurricane Ian floods leave mess, insurance questions behind

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    NORTH PORT, Fla. — Christine Barrett was inside her family’s North Port home during Hurricane Ian when one of her children started yelling that water was coming up from the shower.

    Then it started coming in from outside the house. Eventually the family was forced to climb on top of their kitchen cabinets — they put water wings on their 1-year-old — and were rescued the next day by boat.

    After the floodwaters had finally gone down Barrett and her family were cleaning out the damp and muddy house. On the front lawn lay chairs, a dresser, couch cushions, flooring planks and a pile of damp drywall. Similar scenes played out across the block as residents tried to clear out the soggy mess before mold set in.

    North Port is about 5 miles (8 kilometers) inland and the Barretts – like many of its residents – live in areas where flood insurance isn’t required and therefore, don’t have it. Now many wonder how they’ll afford much-needed repairs.

    “Nobody in this neighborhood has flood insurance because we are a nonflooding area,” she said. “But we got 14 inches of water in our house.”

    Many people associate hurricanes with wind damage — downed power lines, shingles or roofing materials ripped off, trees blown over into homes or windows smashed by flying objects, and Hurricane Ian’s 150-mph (241-kph) winds certainly caused widespread damage.

    But hurricanes can also pack a massive storm surge as Ian did in places like Naples or Fort Myers Beach.

    Heavy rains from hurricanes can also cause widespread flooding far from the beach. Ian dumped rain for hours as it lumbered across the state, sending waterways spilling over their banks and into homes and businesses far inland from where Ian made landfall. People were using kayaks to evacuate their flooded homes, and floodwaters in some areas have still not gone down a week after landfall.

    “This is such a big storm, brought so much water, that you’re having basically what’s been a 500-year flood event,” said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    But flooding is not covered by a homeowner’s insurance policy.

    It must be purchased separately — usually from the federal government. Although most people have the option of purchasing flood insurance, it is required only on government-backed mortgages that sit in areas that the Federal Emergency Management Agency deems highest risk. Many banks require it in high-risk zones, too. But some homeowners who pay off their mortgage drop their flood insurance once it’s not required. Or if they purchase a house or mobile home with cash they may not opt for it at all. And flooding can and does happen outside those high risk areas where flood insurance is required.

    There have long been concerns that not enough people have flood insurance especially at a time when climate change is making strong hurricanes even stronger and making storms in general wetter, slower and more prone to intensifying rapidly. According to the Insurance Information Institute, only about 4% of homeowners nationwide have flood insurance although 90% of catastrophes in the U.S. involve flooding. In Florida that number is only about 18%.

    “We have experienced catastrophic flood events across the U.S. this year, including in Kentucky and Missouri, where virtually no one had flood insurance,” said the Institute’s Mark Friedlander.

    Hurricane Ian caused extensive flooding in areas outside of the high-risk zones. According to the consulting firm Milliman, roughly 18.5% of homes in counties that were under an evacuation order had federally issued flood insurance. In areas under an evacuation order that were outside of high-risk zones, 9.4% of homes had a policy.

    Last year, FEMA updated its pricing system for flood insurance to more accurately reflect risk called Risk Rating 2.0. The old system considered a home’s elevation and whether it was in a high-risk flood zone. Risk Rating 2.0 looks at the risk that an individual property will flood, considering factors like its distance to water. The new pricing system raises rates for about three-quarters of policyholders and offers price decreases for the first time.

    FEMA has long said the new ratings would attract new policyholders. However, a FEMA report to the treasury secretary and a handful of congressional leaders last year said far fewer people would buy flood insurance as prices rise. Since the new rating system has gone into effect in Florida, the number of polices in the state has dropped by roughly 50,000 since August 2021.

    After a federally declared disaster, homeowners with flood insurance are likely to receive more money, more quickly, to recover and rebuild than the uninsured.

    After major flooding in Louisiana in 2016, for example, the average payment to a flood insurance policyholder was $86,500, according to FEMA. Uninsured homeowners could get individual assistance payments for needs like temporary housing and property damage, but they averaged roughly $9,150.

    Congress sometimes provides additional aid after major disasters although that can take months to years to arrive.

    “Unless you have flood insurance, the federal government is not going to give you enough assistance to rebuild your home,” said Rob Moore, water and climate team director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

    In the North Port neighborhood that was cleaning up from Ian, Ron Audette wasn’t sure whether he would get flood insurance going forward because of the cost. The retired U.S. Navy sailor was cleaning up his one-story home on a corner lot after floodwaters buckled the laminate flooring, swelled wood furniture and left the leather reclining sofa where he watched Patriots games a muddy, watery mess.

    “I don’t think we could live here if we had to buy flood insurance,” he said.

    But down the street, his neighbor Barrett was definitely planning to get it.

    “Get flood insurance even if it’s not required,” she advised. “Because we definitely will now.”

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    Phillis reported from St. Louis, Missouri.

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    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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  • After Ian, coastal residents return to pick up the pieces

    After Ian, coastal residents return to pick up the pieces

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    SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla. — Rotting fish and garbage lie scattered in Sanibel Island’s streets. On the mainland, debris from washed-away homes is heaped in a canal like matchsticks. Huge shrimp boats sit perched amid the remains of a mobile home park.

    “Think of a snow globe. Pick it up and shake it — that’s what happened,” said Fred Szott.

    For the past three days, he and his wife Joyce have been making trips to their damaged mobile home in Fort Myers to begin cleaning up after Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast.

    As for the emotional turbulence, he says: “You either hold on, or you lose it.”

    Just offshore, residents of Florida’s devastated barrier islands are also returning to assess the damage to homes and businesses, despite limited access to some areas.

    The broken causeway to Sanibel Island might not be passable until the end of the month. In the meantime, residents like Pamela Brislin arrived by boat to see what they could salvage.

    Brislin stayed through the storm, but is haunted by what happened afterward. When she checked on a neighbor, she found the woman crying. Her husband had passed away, his body laid out on a picnic table until help could arrive. Another neighbor’s house caught fire. The flames were so large that they forced Breslin to do what the hurricane could not — flee with her husband and a neighbor’s dog.

    Ian, a Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour (240 kilometers per hour), unleashed torrents of rain and caused extensive flooding and damage. The deluge turned streets into gushing rivers. Backyard waterways overflowed into neighborhoods, sometimes by more than a dozen feet (3.5 meters), tossing boats onto yards and roadways. Beaches disappeared, as ocean surges pushed shorelines far inland.

    Sanibel Island had ordered a complete curfew after the storm passed, allowing search and rescue teams to do their work. That meant residents who evacuated the island were technically blocked from returning.

    But the city of about 7,000 started allowing residents back from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Wednesday. City manager Dana Souza told residents in a Facebook Live stream that he wished the municipality had resources to provide transportation but that, for now, residents would have to arrange visits by private boat.

    Pine Island is closer to the mainland than Sanibel, but it too was hit hard by the storm.

    Cindy Bickford’s house was still standing. Much of the damage was from the flooding, which left a thick layer of rancid muck on her floors.

    “It’s not our stuff we’re worried about. It’s our community. Pine Island is extremely close-knit,” said Bickford, who arrived Thursday for the first time.

    She was hopeful that much could be salvaged.

    “We’ll tear the home apart so we can live in it,” said Bickford, who wore a T-shirt that said “Relax,” “Refresh” and “Renew.”

    The storm caused billions of dollars in damage and killed dozens of people, the majority of victims in Florida. Even a week after it passed through, officials warn that more dead could still be found as they continued to inspect the damage.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, at a news conference Thursday in the Sarasota County town of Nokomis, trumpeted the widespread restoration of running water through the storm-hit zone and the work toward restoring power. Some 185,000 customers remain without electricity, down from highs above 2.6 million across the state.

    He said rescue workers have conducted around 2,500 missions, particularly on barrier islands on the Gulf coast as well as in inland areas that have seen intense flooding. More than 90,000 structures have been inspected and checked for survivors, he said.

    He said residents areas devastated by the hurricane had been showing great resilience over the past week.

    President Joe Biden toured some of Florida’s hurricane-hit areas on Wednesday, surveying damage by helicopter and then walking on foot alongside DeSantis. The Democratic president and Republican governor pledged to put political rivalries aside to help rebuild homes, businesses and lives. Biden emphasized at a briefing with local officials that the effort could take years.

    At least 98 storm-related deaths have been reported, 89 of them in Florida. In hardest-hit Lee County, Florida, the vast majority of people killed by the hurricane were over age 50.

    Five people were also killed in North Carolina, three in Cuba and one in Virginia since Ian made landfall on the Caribbean island Sept. 27, a day before it reached Florida. After roaring northeast across Florida and into the Atlantic, the hurricane made another landfall in South Carolina before pushing into the mid-Atlantic states.

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    Calvan reported from Pine Island, Florida. Associated Press writers Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee and Ian Mader in Miami contributed to this report.

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  • Florida’s island dwellers digging out from Ian’s destruction

    Florida’s island dwellers digging out from Ian’s destruction

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    ST. JAMES CITY, Fla. — Following Hurricane Ian’s destruction, many residents on one Florida island have stayed put for days without electricity and other resources while hoping the lone bridge to the mainland is repaired.

    Pine Island, the largest barrier island off Florida’s Gulf Coast, has been largely cut off from the outside world after Ian heavily damaged its causeway and rendered its towns reachable only by boat or aircraft.

    “We feel as a community that if we leave the island — abandon it — nobody is going to take care of that problem of fixing our road in and out,” Pine Island resident Leslie Arias said as small motor boats delivered water and other necessities.

    A week after the Category 4 storm hit southwest Florida, the full breadth of its destruction is still coming into focus. Utility workers continued Wednesday to push ahead to restore power and crews searched for anyone still trapped inside flooded or damaged homes, while the number of storm-related deaths has risen to at least 84 in recent days.

    At least 75 people were killed in Florida, five in North Carolina, three in Cuba and one in Virginia since Ian made landfall on the Caribbean island Sept. 27, a day before it reached Florida’s Gulf Coast. After churning northeastward into the Atlantic, the hurricane made another landfall in South Carolina before pushing into the mid-Atlantic states.

    There have been deaths in vehicle wrecks, drownings and accidents. A man drowned after becoming trapped under a vehicle. Another got trapped trying to climb through a window. And a woman died when a gust of wind knocked her off her porch while she was smoking a cigarette as the storm approached, authorities said.

    In hardest-hit Lee County, Florida, all 45 people killed by the hurricane were over age 50.

    President Joe Biden was scheduled Wednesday to visit Fort Myers’ Fisherman’s Wharf in an area that was especially devastated by winds and surging tides.

    Boats, including huge yachts, were thrown asunder, laying capsized inland far from their usual moorings. Homes and businesses lay in ruins with shattered windows, while the the surrounding landscape is a wasteland of debris and muck.

    The wharf lies on one side of the bridge that leads into Fort Myers Beach, which was brutalized by the storm.

    The Biden administration said the president has made additional federal disaster assistance available to Florida, including for debris removal and emergency protective measures.

    Power restoration has become job one, but vehicle access from barrier islands to the mainland is also a priority. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said a temporary bridge to Pine Island should be finished by the end of the week.

    Officials are also planning a similar temporary bridge for nearby Sanibel Island, but it will take a little more time.

    “They were talking about running ferries and stuff,” DeSantis said. “And honestly, you may be able to do that, but I think this is an easier thing, and I think people need their vehicles anyways.”

    In the meantime, small motorboats continued to provision Pine Island. Jay Pick, who has been on the island since May to help his in-laws, said the winds from Ian blew the house’s roof off.

    “We’re all safe, though,” Pick said Tuesday afternoon. “We’re blessed. Driving around seeing what some people have compared to what we have left, you get that survivor-guilt thing. I’m trying not to. I’m trying to be happy for what we do have left.”

    Arias, who also chose to stay on the island, said Tuesday that many who stayed are supporting each other.

    “We have now gathered a lot of resources, not only donations but volunteers as well,” Arias said. “It’s a wonderful thing to see how the community has come together. In every end of the island … there is a family member or a neighbor helping that other neighbor.”

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    Associated Press writer Bobby Caina Calvan in Fort Myers, Florida, contributed to this report.

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    For more coverage of Hurricane Ian, go to: https://apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • Ian deals blow to Florida’s teetering insurance sector

    Ian deals blow to Florida’s teetering insurance sector

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    Daniel Kelly and his wife bought a 1977 doublewide mobile home in May for about $83,000 at Tropicana Sands, a community for people 55 and older in Fort Myers, Florida. But he ran into roadblocks when he tried to insure it.

    Managers at Tropicana Sands told him he likely wouldn’t be able to find a carrier who would offer a policy because the home was too old. He said he checked with a Florida-based insurance agent who searched and couldn’t find anything.

    “I can insure a 1940s car, why can’t I insure this?” Kelly said.

    Kelly was lucky that his trailer was largely spared by Hurricane Ian aside from some flood damage. But for many Floridians whose homes were destroyed, they now face the arduous task of rebuilding without insurance or paying even steeper prices in an insurance market that was already struggling. Wind and storm-surge losses from the hurricane could reach between $28 billion and $47 billion, making it Florida’s costliest storm since Hurricane Andrew made landfall in 1992, according to the property analytics firm CoreLogic.

    Even before Ian, Florida’s home insurance market was dealing with billions of dollars in losses from a string of natural disasters, rampant litigation and increasing fraud. The difficult environment has put many insurers out of business and caused others to raise their prices or tighten their restrictions, making it harder for Floridians to obtain insurance.

    Those who do manage to insure their homes are seeing costs increase exponentially. Even before Hurricane Ian, the annual cost of an average Florida homeowners insurance policy was expected to reach $4,231 in 2022, nearly three times the U.S. average of $1,544.

    “They are paying more for less coverage,” said Florida’s Insurance Consumer Advocate Tasha Carter. “It puts consumers in dire circumstances.”

    The costs have gotten so high that some homeowners have forgone coverage altogether. About 12% of Florida homeowners don’t have property insurance — or more than double the U.S. average of 5% — according to the Insurance Information Institute, a research organization funded by the insurance industry.

    Florida’s insurance industry has seen two straight years of net underwriting losses exceeding $1 billion each year. A string of property insurers, including six so far this year, have become insolvent, while others are leaving the state.

    As of July, 27 Florida insurers were on a state watchlist for their precarious financial situation; Mark Friedlander, the head of communications for the Insurance Information Institute, expects Hurricane Ian will cause at least some of those to tip into insolvency.

    The insurance industry says overzealous litigation is partly to blame. Loopholes in Florida law, including fee multipliers that allow attorneys to collect higher fees for property insurance cases, have made Florida an excessively litigious state, Friedlander said.

    Florida currently averages about 100,000 lawsuits over homeowners’ insurance claims per year, he said. That compares to just 3,600 in California, which has almost double Florida’s population.

    The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation said the state accounts for 76% of the nation’s homeowners’ insurance claims lawsuits but just 9% of all homeowners insurance claims.

    “Plaintiff attorneys in Florida have historically found ways of circumventing any efforts at reining in legal system abuses, making it likely that ongoing reforms will be needed to further stabilize the insurance marketplace,” said Logan McFaddin of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association.

    But Amy Boggs, the property section chair for the Florida Justice Association — a group that represents attorneys — said the insurance industry is also at fault for refusing to pay out claims. Boggs said homeowners are driven to attorneys “as a last resort.”

    “No policyholder wants to be embroiled in years of litigation just to get their homes rebuilt,” she said. “They come to attorneys when their insurance company underpays their claim and they can’t rebuild.”

    Rampant fraud — particularly among roofing contractors — has also added to costs. Regulators say it’s common for contractors to go door-to-door offering to cover homeowners’ insurance deductible in exchange for submitting a full roof replacement claim to their property insurance company, claiming damage from storms.

    Things have gotten so bad with insurance that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called a special session in May to address the issues. New laws limit the rates attorneys can charge for some property insurance claims and require insurers to insure homes with older roofs — something they had stopped doing because of rising fraud claims.

    The legislation also includes a $150 million fund that will offer grants to homeowners to make improvements to protect against hurricanes. But that program has yet to be launched, and experts say it will take years to reverse the damage to Florida’s insurance market.

    In the meantime, the crisis has pushed more homeowners to Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer that sells home insurance for those who can’t get coverage through private insurers.

    Citizens had more than 1 million active policies as of Sept. 23, before Ian hit, according to Michael Peltier, a spokesman at Citizens. In 2019, that number was roughly 420,000. He said the company had been writing 8,000 to 9,000 new policies per week, double compared with a few years ago. Citizens has $13.4 billion in reserves and predicts it will pay 225,000 claims from Ian worth a total of $3.7 billion.

    Even if they have homeowners’ insurance, many Floridians could still be facing financial ruin because of flooding. Flood damage isn’t typically covered by homeowners’ insurance but can be costly; Florida’s Division of Emergency Management says 1 inch of floodwater can do $25,000 in damage.

    Friedlander said just 18% of Florida homeowners carry flood insurance, either through the federal government’s National Flood Insurance Program or private insurers. In some coastal areas, more than half of homeowners have flood insurance, but in inland areas — where flood waters continued to rise even after the storm had passed — it’s closer to 5%.

    Kelly, whose trailer in Fort Myers was saturated in 4 feet of salt water and sewage after Hurricane Ian, could have benefitted from flood insurance. He thought he might not be able to get it because he didn’t have homeowners insurance, but that’s not the case — flood insurance is completely separate and can even be purchased by renters, experts say.

    “I kinda let it lie when I originally couldn’t find someone to insure it,” he said. “It’s a costly oversight on my part.”

    ————

    Associated Press writer Steve LeBlanc in Boston contributed to this report.

    ————

    For more coverage of Hurricane Ian, go to: https://apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • Son documents harrowing rescue of mom from Ian’s floodwaters

    Son documents harrowing rescue of mom from Ian’s floodwaters

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    In one photo, Johnny Lauder’s 86-year-old mother is in her Florida home, submerged nearly to her shoulders in black murky water, staring straight at the camera, mouth open.

    In another, she lies just above the waterline on a table, wrapped in sheets to keep warm. In yet another, she’s being pushed through the water in a wheelchair, her rescue nearly complete.

    The photos were taken after Hurricane Ian made landfall last Wednesday, bringing a powerful storm surge and 150 mph (241 kph) winds. They tell the story of Lauder’s journey to save his mother, Karen Lauder, from the home she refused to leave, despite the family’s pleading .

    He sent the short videos and photos to his family, letting them know he was OK.

    “That’s how I unintentionally documented the whole ordeal,” he said.

    Before the storm hit, Lauder said his mother — who lost a leg and requires a wheelchair — “ kicked and screamed” and said she didn’t want to leave her home in Naples, Florida. “We didn’t evacuate because we couldn’t leave her behind,” he explained.

    She did not expect the level of destruction Ian would bring. Speaking from his son’s home on Tuesday, Lauder said his mom’s house had flooded about six inches during Hurricane Irma in 2017, so she assumed a similar outcome with Ian.

    Instead, Ian ravaged Florida as one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the U.S. and flooded more than three feet of her home, trapping her inside. She called her son for help.

    “She said the water was up to her wheelchair and hitting her belly button,” Lauder said. He was sheltering at his son’s house, a half mile (0.8 km) from his mom.

    Lauder, who said he has rescue diver training, dove out the window. He swam, walked, waded and kicked through water for about 45 minutes to get to her house. He said a van and a couple cars floated past him as he steered clear of sparking electric poles.

    Lauder said he heard his mother screaming as he approached.

    “It was a sense of terror and relief at the same time,” he said. “The terror was that I didn’t know if something was falling on her or if she was trapped and hurt. But the relief was knowing that there’s still air in her lungs.”

    He put her on a table and bundled her in dry sheets from a high shelf. He worried about the sores around her body — open wounds that were dangerously susceptible to infection in the bacteria —ridden floodwater.

    They waited three hours for the water to subside, so he could push her through the streets in her wheelchair. When the water was a couple feet high, he called for his 20-year-old son to join them and help push grandma to safety.

    Around 1 a.m. — about 11 hours after Lauder’s mother called him for help — Lauder returned to his older son’s house with his mother and younger son in tow.

    Lauder said his mom was later taken to a hospital, because she had some infections. “But they were treated, and she’s warm. She’s in a soft comfy bed. She’s good,” he added.

    Cassandra Clark, Lauder’s sister-in-law in Miami, started a GoFundMe to raise money for Lauder, his mother and his sons.

    “While we’re so grateful our family is physically alright, they’ve lost absolutely everything in this storm and, unfortunately, did not have any renter’s insurance,” Clark wrote.

    The page raised over $17,000 as of Tuesday.

    “I get choked up that all these people are helping me and they don’t even know me,” Lauder said.

    He hopes that people will know now to evacuate. “My mom has changed her tone: she will be evacuating next time,” he said. “I hope people learn from others’ mistakes and not their own.”

    ———

    Trisha Ahmed is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Trisha Ahmed on Twitter.

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  • Hurricane Ian shakes SW Florida’s faith but can’t destroy it

    Hurricane Ian shakes SW Florida’s faith but can’t destroy it

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. — In darkness and despair, there were flickers of light and hope, even for Jane Compton who lost her home and possessions to Hurricane Ian’s wrath. As the storm approached last week, she and her husband found sanctuary at their Baptist church, huddling with fellow parishioners through wind, rain and worry.

    They prayed for the gusts to subside and for God to keep them from harm as the hurricane made landfall last Wednesday. Floodwaters swept under the pews, driving the congregation to the pulpit and further testing their faith. The intensifying storm ripped the church’s steeple away, leaving a large gap in the roof. The parishioners shuddered.

    “Good Lord, please protect us,” Compton prayed, with her husband, Del, at her side.

    She compared the deluge to the biblical story Noah’s Ark, saying they had no idea when the water would stop rising. When it did, there were hallelujahs.

    With the storm now passed and its devastation abounding, churches across hard-hit Southwest Florida are providing a steadying force in the lives of those plunged into chaos and grief. Heartache, frustration and uncertainty now swirl in sanctuaries amid sermons about perseverance and holding on to one’s faith.

    “We believe this was a blessing in disguise,” said the Rev. Robert Kasten, the Comptons’ pastor at Southwest Baptist Church, a congregation of several hundred in one of the most devastated neighborhoods of Fort Myers.

    Also being tested are many of the nearly quarter million Catholics in the Diocese of Venice, which encompasses 10 counties from just south of Tampa Bay to the Everglades that bore the brunt of the hurricane. Bishop Frank Dewane has been visiting as many of the diocese’s five dozen parishes and 15 schools as possible.

    “A lot of people just wanted to talk about, ‘Why is there this much suffering?’” Dewane said of parishioners he met as he celebrated weekend Mass in a church in an inundated North Port neighborhood and in the parish hall of a storm-damaged Sarasota church. “We have to go on; we’re a people of hope.”

    Priests walked a fine line between holding Mass to provide comfort and not endangering older parishioners in areas with widespread lack of running water and electricity and flooded roadways. Dewane said one rescued man had kept asking about his wife, not realizing she had drowned in the storm.

    Around Kasten’s church, nearby mobile home parks where many of his parishioners lived became submerged. About a fourth of his congregation suffered major damage to their dwellings, with many like the Comptons losing nearly everything. The church’s sanctuary has become temporary quarters for nearly a dozen of the newly homeless.

    Most were handling things well, until the realities of tragedy hit.

    “When they saw pictures, they just burst into tears,” Kasten said.

    “Just the shock of knowing and seeing what you knew happened, it overwhelmed them. But they are just praising the Lord how he protected us, kept us safe,” he said.

    Barbara Wasko, a retiree who is now sleeping on a lounge chair in the sanctuary, said she has faith the community will rebuild.

    “We will get by,” she said. “We will make it.”

    Hurricane Ian’s fury — 150 mph (241 kph) winds and deluges of water — killed dozens of people and stranded countless in what for many communities has been their worst calamity in generations.

    Rhonda Mitchell, who lives near the Baptist church, said all she had left was her faith in God.

    “We don’t know what He is going to do,” she said, her belongings splayed to dry outside her mobile home as an empty U-Haul truck waited to be loaded.

    “I just lost my whole life,” she said, beginning to sob. “I’m still here but I just lost everything I own. … I’m just trying to figure things out.”

    At badly damaged Catholic churches and schools, reconstruction work is already underway. But Dewane said his priority is to “meet people where they are” and ensure the Catholic community can help overall relief efforts.

    That ranges from finding shelter for teachers whose homes were leveled even as many schools are re-opening this week to helping counsel elderly neighbors. The diocese is working with Catholic Charities to set up distribution centers for donations as well as supplies provided by FEMA.

    But many successful efforts are grassroots. When a group of nuns in small Wauchula, an inland town, lost power, they decided to just empty out their freezers of meat and other perishables, and invite the entire neighborhood for a barbeque. The fire blazing, hundreds of people lined up and started adding what they had in their own rapidly warming fridges.

    “We’re doing as well as we can,” Dewane said. “I think we can only be the Lord’s instruments.”

    The Rev. Charles Cannon, pastor at St. Hilary’s Episcopal Church, sermonized about the temporariness of the community’s losses. While much was lost, he said, not all is gone.

    “People think they have lost everything, but you haven’t lost everything if you haven’t lost yourself and the people you love,” Cannon said after Sunday services that were held outside amid the fallen boughs of once-majestic oaks.

    Cannon pointed out that the debris that left church grounds looking like an ugly, unearthly place can be cleaned.

    “Most of the work has been to get the people feeling safe again,” he said, “Almost everybody has been without power. All of them without water. Trying hard to get them feeling comfortable again.”

    Down the street, about 50 parishioners at the Assembly of God Bethlehem Ministry gathered to share in their hardships. They recounted how they had no electricity, no drinkable running water and, in many cases, were left with damaged homes.

    “But God has kept them safe,” said Victoria Araujo, a parishioner and occasional Sunday school teacher.

    “Some people lost a lot of things … We need to pray for the people who lost more than us,” said the Rev. Ailton da Silva, whose congregants are mostly immigrant families from Brazil.

    The storm has truly tested his community’s resiliency, he said, adding that “I think people will think about faith, family and God.”

    Five years ago, Hurricane Irma swept through the region, causing extensive damage to his church. Repairs were still ongoing when Ian hit. The church fared much better this time.

    In the end, “it’s just a building,” da Silva said. “The church is us.”

    ———

    Dell’Orto reported from Minneapolis.

    ———

    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

    ———

    For more AP coverage of Hurricane Ian: apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • Photographer rides out Ian to capture the storm for others

    Photographer rides out Ian to capture the storm for others

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    Chuck Larsen has lived on Sanibel Island for 12 years and until last week had never experienced a major hurricane. The 76-year-old who moved from California decided to ride out Hurricane Ian in his condominium with little idea of the horror he was about to go through.

    He filled his bathtub with water, stocked up on food and water, and made sure batteries were charged and his windows were rated to withstand 150 mph (240 kph) winds. He followed the forecast thinking the island would get strong wind and rain, and trees would fall, but areas to the north would take the hardest hit.

    “I have to tell you, I felt fairly safe going into this, but when the glass blew out and started shattering inside … I realized this was a problem,” said Larsen, who has since “retreated to Orlando.”

    There was another reason Larsen wanted to stay. He is the part owner and photographer for the local news website santivachronicle.com.

    “I stayed behind to record the event and record the aftermath for publication without realizing exactly how bad this storm was going to be,” Larsen said in a Zoom interview. “I tried to photograph the storm as it was happening. The high winds, the rain, the surge from the Gulf. After the storm I tried to document what was left, what damage was done, and it was horrific.”

    But with no internet or cell phone connectivity, he wasn’t able to publish any material until several days later when he was safely evacuated.

    Larsen has spent a career in television and continues to run a television distribution consulting company. His first television job was as a reporter and anchor at an Indianapolis station. One of his co-workers was weatherman David Letterman.

    Larsen was attracted to Sanibel because of its old Florida charm and the community of residents who want to preserve it. The barrier island off Fort Myers has no buildings taller than three stories, no chain restaurants or stores, no traffic lights and is home to locally owned shops. It’s famous for the thousands of shells that wash up on the beaches and is a quaint, picturesque island for tourists.

    He and his wife vacationed there a few years before deciding to move to the island of about 6,500 full-time residents. Sanibel attracts retirees — about 57% of the population is 65 years old or older — and while not an enclave for the mega-rich, the median value of owner-occupied homes tops $700,000 and its per capita income is more than $90,000, both well above state averages.

    “At the moment, it looks like nothing you would remember if you had ever visited Sanibel. It’s devastated,” Larsen said.

    While he, his wife and two dogs took shelter in an interior room during the storm, he ventured out the next morning with his camera hoping to get images for his news website, which covers community events, human interest stories and features on residents of Sanibel and nearby Captiva Island.

    “It was like living in a war zone — just decimated property and condominiums, trees gone, I don’t think there was a car that survived. It was pretty dramatic, much worse than I’ve ever experienced,” Larsen said.

    He and his wife eventually found a boat to take them to the mainland. They’re staying with a daughter in Orlando, not sure when they’ll be able to get back to their island home. But Larsen is sure they will.

    “Sanibel is a very cohesive community. It will rebuild. It won’t happen immediately. It will probably happen faster than most people might think, but it will need a complete rebuild — electric grid, water systems — it’s going to take a lot of work, but it will come back. I have no doubt about that.”

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  • In Hurricane Ian’s wake, dangers persist, worsen in parts

    In Hurricane Ian’s wake, dangers persist, worsen in parts

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. — People kayaking down streets that were passable just a day or two earlier. Hundreds of thousands without power. National Guard helicopters flying rescue missions to residents still stranded on Florida’s barrier islands.

    Days after Hurricane Ian carved a path of destruction from Florida to the Carolinas, the dangers persisted, and even worsened in some places. It was clear the road to recovery from this monster storm will be long and painful.

    And Ian was still not done. The storm doused Virginia with rain Sunday, and officials warned of the potential for severe flooding along its coast, beginning overnight Monday.

    Ian’s remnants moved offshore and formed a nor’easter that is expected to pile even more water into an already inundated Chesapeake Bay and threatened to cause the most significant tidal flooding event in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region in the last 10 to 15 years, said Cody Poche, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

    The island town of Chincoteague declared a state of emergency Sunday and strongly recommended that residents in certain areas evacuate. The Eastern Shore and northern portion of North Carolina’s Outer Banks were also likely to be impacted.

    At least 68 people have been confirmed dead: 61 in Florida, four in North Carolina and three in Cuba.

    With the death toll rising, Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the federal government was ready to help in a huge way, focusing first on victims in Florida, which took the brunt of one of the strongest storms to make landfall in the United States. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden plan to visit the state on Wednesday.

    Flooded roadways and washed-out bridges to barrier islands left many people isolated amid limited cellphone service and a lack of basic amenities such as water, electricity and the internet. Officials warned that the situation in many areas isn’t expected to improve for several days because the rain that fell has nowhere to go because waterways are overflowing.

    Fewer than 700,000 homes and businesses in Florida were still without electricity by late Sunday, down from a peak of 2.6 million.

    Criswell told “Fox News Sunday” that the federal government, including the Coast Guard and Department of Defense, had moved into position “the largest amount of search and rescue assets that I think we’ve ever put in place before.”

    Still, recovery will take time, said Criswell, who visited the state Friday and Saturday to assess the damage and talk to survivors. She cautioned that dangers remain with downed power lines in standing water.

    More than 1,600 people have been rescued statewide, according to Florida’s emergency management agency.

    Rescue missions were ongoing, especially to Florida’s barrier islands, which were cut off from the mainland when storm surges destroyed causeways and bridges.

    The state will build a temporary traffic passageway for the largest one, Pine Island, DeSantis said Sunday, adding that an allocation had been approved for Deportment of Transportation to build it this week and construction could start as soon as Monday.

    “It’s not going to be a full bridge, you’re going to have to go over it probably at 5 miles an hour or something, but it’ll at least let people get in and off the island with their vehicles,” the governor said at a news conference.

    Coast Guard, municipal and private crews have been using helicopters, boats and even jetskis to evacuate people over the past several days.

    In rural Seminole County, north of Orlando, residents donned waders, boots and bug spray to paddle to their flooded homes Sunday.

    Ben Bertat found 4 inches (10 centimeters) of water in his house by Lake Harney after kayaking there.

    “I think it’s going to get worse because all of this water has to get to the lake” said Bertat, pointing to the water flooding a nearby road. “With ground saturation, all this swamp is full and it just can’t take any more water. It doesn’t look like it’s getting any lower.”

    Elsewhere, power remained knocked out to at least half of South Carolina’s Pawleys Island, a beach community roughly 75 miles (115 kilometers) up the coast from Charleston. In North Carolina, the storm downed trees and power lines.

    ———

    Associated Press reporters Rebecca Santana in Ft. Myers; Brendan Farrington and Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee; David Fischer in Miami; Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Va.; and Richard Lardner in Washington contributed to this report.

    ———

    For more AP coverage of Hurricane Ian: apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • By boat and jet ski, volunteers assist in Ian rescue efforts

    By boat and jet ski, volunteers assist in Ian rescue efforts

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    SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla. — There was no time to waste. As Hurricane Ian lashed southwest Florida, Bryan Stern, a veteran of the U.S. military, and others began gathering crews, boats and even crowbars for the urgent task that would soon be at hand: rescuing hundreds of people who might get trapped by floodwaters.

    “As soon as the sun came up, we started rolling,” said Stern, who last year put together a search-and-rescue team called Project Dynamo, which has undertaken operations in Afghanistan, Ukraine and, now, Florida.

    Project Dynamo has rescued more than 20 people, many of them elderly residents who became cut off when the Category 4 storm washed away a bridge connecting the Florida mainland with Sanibel Island, a crescent-shaped sliver of shell-strewn sand popular with tourists that is home to about 7,000 residents.

    On a stretch of beach, etched into the sand, there were calls for immediate assistance: “Help,” “SOS.”

    As local authorities continue reaching people isolated on barrier islands or trapped by floodwaters, others unwilling to be bystanders have sprung into action, sometimes risking their own safety or setting aside their own losses and travails to aid official rescue operations. It isn’t a new phenomenon: Grassroots rescue groups have responded to past disasters, including after Hurricane Ida pounded Louisiana last year.

    Although some officials frown on people running their own rescue operations — especially in the early going if it’s not safe enough yet or if the rescuers lack training — others welcome every bit of help.

    “It sort of restores your view of humanity. You see people chipping in and they aren’t getting paid for it,” said Tim Barrett, the training division chief for the Sanibel Fire Department. “There’s even people whose homes are destroyed, but they’re helping them. They’re still helping other people.”

    It can be dangerous work. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed by the ferocious storm, which lashed some areas with winds of 155 mph (249 kph) or more and pummeled the coast with ocean surge.

    “We’re still working on rescuing people. I mean, this is just horrible that people have lost their lives. It’s horrible that people are still possibly stuck in rubble,” Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

    “But I’ve been talking to the sheriffs and first responders and they’re trying to get to these people as quickly as they can.,” he said. “They’ve been working to evacuate people that stayed on, places like Sanibel and Pine Island and Fort Myers Beach.”

    The storm has killed dozens of people in Florida and more bodies might still be recovered.

    Matt Mengel and his friends said they had made seven rescues so far, most of them elderly residents of Sanibel Island whom they reached on jet skis.

    “We had gasoline. We had jet skis. We had water. We had food and snacks. And our mission was just to go find them, dead or alive,” he said.

    He called the destruction of the area, where he has lived for seven years, heartbreaking. “It was sad to see our home get destroyed and our favorite spots get destroyed.”

    The group’s rescue missions began Friday when they hadn’t heard from a friend who lives and works on Sanibel Island. That friend was found safe and sound, but they quickly found others who needed help.

    Just as they were leaving, Mengel’s girlfriend heard a woman calling out for help. They responded and found a couple who desperately wanted to leave the island.

    A Coast Guard helicopter was patrolling nearby, and Mengel — with the help of the Project Dynamo crew — began frantically waving for attention. The helicopter spotted him and touched down on the beach to whisk the couple away.

    “All I wanted to do was help,” Mengel said.

    A local television station recounted how three siblings — Leah, Evan and Jayden Wickert — helped save about 30 people from rising floodwaters in a Naples neighborhood.

    Water had deepened to about 6 feet (nearly 2 meters) in their neighborhood, and folks were standing on whatever they could to keep their necks above water. The siblings used kayaks and boats to save people.

    “There were a lot of people standing on their couches getting out of the water,” Leah Wickert told WBBH-TV.

    Betty Reynolds, 73, expressed appreciation for the men who came to her rescue after she spent days in her damaged Sanibel Island home.

    “You hate to leave a home you’ve lived in for 47 years,” she said, but said it filled with “lots and lots of mud.”

    She said she didn’t evacuate before the storm because she and her home survived previous storms unscathed. But she said this one took her by surprise: “I just didn’t believe there was going to be so much storm surge.”

    Reynolds was taken off the island Saturday while Stern and his Project Dynamo team were on another mission, having received a text from a man who was concerned about his mother.

    Stern, whose cohorts are also military veterans, speaks quickly and is full of bravado. On a recent trip to Sanibel Island, he landed a boat directly on the beach, jumped into the water as it hit the sand and ran ashore.

    “It’s like D-Day,” he said afterward.

    When there was no answer at the home of the woman whose son had texted, his team used a crowbar to enter, with the son’s permission.

    Stern said he couldn’t stand by. His rescue project was borne out of his frustrations watching Americans and their allies struggle last year to get out of Afghanistan.

    He has since turned his attention to helping people flee the war in Ukraine, where Stern and his team plan to return soon after what he called a brief “vacation” in Florida.

    ———

    Find more AP coverage of Hurricane Ian: https://apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • In Hurricane Ian’s wake, dangers persist, worsen in parts

    In Hurricane Ian’s wake, dangers persist, worsen in parts

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. — People kayaking down streets that were passable just a day or two earlier. Hundreds of thousands without power. National Guard helicopters flying rescue missions to residents still stranded on Florida’s barrier islands.

    Days after Hurricane Ian carved a path of destruction from Florida to the Carolinas, the dangers persisted, and even worsened in some places. It was clear the road to recovery from this monster storm will be long and painful.

    And Ian was still not done. The storm doused Virginia with rain Sunday, and officials warned of the potential for severe flooding along its coast, beginning overnight Monday.

    Ian’s remnants moved offshore and formed a nor’easter that is expected to pile even more water into an already inundated Chesapeake Bay and threatened to cause the most significant tidal flooding event in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region in the last 10 to 15 years, said Cody Poche, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

    The island town of Chincoteague declared a state of emergency Sunday and strongly recommended that residents in certain areas evacuate. The Eastern Shore and northern portion of North Carolina’s Outer Banks were also likely to be impacted.

    At least 68 people have been confirmed dead: 61 in Florida, four in North Carolina and three in Cuba.

    With the death toll rising, Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the federal government was ready to help in a huge way, focusing first on victims in Florida, which took the brunt of one of the strongest storms to make landfall in the United States. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden plan to visit the state on Wednesday.

    Flooded roadways and washed-out bridges to barrier islands left many people isolated amid limited cellphone service and a lack of basic amenities such as water, electricity and the internet. Officials warned that the situation in many areas isn’t expected to improve for several days because the rain that fell has nowhere to go because waterways are overflowing.

    Fewer than 700,000 homes and businesses in Florida were still without electricity by late Sunday, down from a peak of 2.6 million.

    Criswell told “Fox News Sunday” that the federal government, including the Coast Guard and Department of Defense, had moved into position “the largest amount of search and rescue assets that I think we’ve ever put in place before.”

    Still, recovery will take time, said Criswell, who visited the state Friday and Saturday to assess the damage and talk to survivors. She cautioned that dangers remain with downed power lines in standing water.

    More than 1,600 people have been rescued statewide, according to Florida’s emergency management agency.

    Rescue missions were ongoing, especially to Florida’s barrier islands, which were cut off from the mainland when storm surges destroyed causeways and bridges.

    The state will build a temporary traffic passageway for the largest one, Pine Island, DeSantis said Sunday, adding that an allocation had been approved for Deportment of Transportation to build it this week and construction could start as soon as Monday.

    “It’s not going to be a full bridge, you’re going to have to go over it probably at 5 miles an hour or something, but it’ll at least let people get in and off the island with their vehicles,” the governor said at a news conference.

    Coast Guard, municipal and private crews have been using helicopters, boats and even jetskis to evacuate people over the past several days.

    In rural Seminole County, north of Orlando, residents donned waders, boots and bug spray to paddle to their flooded homes Sunday.

    Ben Bertat found 4 inches (10 centimeters) of water in his house by Lake Harney after kayaking there.

    “I think it’s going to get worse because all of this water has to get to the lake” said Bertat, pointing to the water flooding a nearby road. “With ground saturation, all this swamp is full and it just can’t take any more water. It doesn’t look like it’s getting any lower.”

    Elsewhere, power remained knocked out to at least half of South Carolina’s Pawleys Island, a beach community roughly 75 miles (115 kilometers) up the coast from Charleston. In North Carolina, the storm downed trees and power lines.

    ———

    Associated Press reporters Rebecca Santana in Ft. Myers; Brendan Farrington and Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee; David Fischer in Miami; Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Va.; and Richard Lardner in Washington contributed to this report.

    ———

    For more AP coverage of Hurricane Ian: apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • Cat. 3 Hurricane Orlene heads for Mexico’s Pacific coast

    Cat. 3 Hurricane Orlene heads for Mexico’s Pacific coast

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    MEXICO CITY — Hurricane Orlene lost some punch, but remained a dangerous Category 3 storm on Sunday as it headed toward Mexico’s northwest Pacific coast between the tourist towns of Mazatlan and San Blas.

    After growing into a hurricane Saturday, Orlene quickly added power, peaking as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph (215 kph) early Sunday, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center. But winds slipped back to 115 mph (185 kph) by late Sunday.

    The storm was moving over or near the Islas Marias, a former prison colony being developed as a tourist draw. The island is sparsely populated by government employees and buildings there are made of brick or concrete.

    Orlene was forecast to hit Mexico’s Pacific coast sometime Monday along a sparsely populated, lagoon-dotted stretch of mainland south of Mazatlan by late Monday.

    By late Sunday, Orlene was centered about 80 miles (125 kilometers) west-northwest of Cabo Corrientes — a point of land that juts into the Pacific just south of Puerto Vallarta — and was headed north at 8 mph (13 kph) early Sunday.

    A hurricane warning was in effect from San Blas to Mazatlan.

    The government of Jalisco state, where Puerto Vallarta is located, suspended classes Monday in towns and cities along the coast.

    The state civil defense office posted video of large waves crashing on a dock at Cabo Corrientes.

    In Sinaloa, where Mazatlan is located, some emergency shelters were opened.

    The center said the storm would likely begin weakening as its moved closer to land. But it was still projected to hit as a hurricane.

    It could bring flood-inducing rainfall of up to 10 inches (25 centimeters) in some places, as well as coastal flooding and dangerous surf.

    The ports of Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta were closed to ships and Mexico’s navy announced that ports including Mazatlan, San Blas and Nuevo Vallarta were closed to small craft.

    Mexico’s National Water Commission said Orlene could cause “mudslides, rising river and stream levels, and flooding in low-lying areas.”

    The hurricane center said hurricane-force winds extended out about 15 miles (30 kilometers) from the center and tropical storm-force winds out to 70 miles (110 kilometers).

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  • Feds vow major aid for Hurricane Ian victims amid rescues

    Feds vow major aid for Hurricane Ian victims amid rescues

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. — With the death toll from Hurricane Ian rising and hundreds of thousands of people without power in Florida and the Carolinas, U.S. officials vowed Sunday to unleash an unprecedented amount of federal disaster aid as crews scrambled to rescue people still trapped by floodwaters.

    Days after Ian tore through central Florida, carving a deadly path of destruction into the Carolinas, water levels continued to rise in some flooded areas, inundating homes and streets that were passable just a day or two earlier.

    With branches strewn across the grounds of St. Hillary’s Episcopal Church in Ft. Myers, the Rev. Charles Cannon recognized the immense loss during his Sunday sermon but also gave thanks for what remained. That included the church’s stained-glass windows and steeple.

    “People think they have lost everything, but you haven’t lost everything if you haven’t lost yourself,” he said.

    Deanne Criswell, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the federal government was ready to help in a huge way, focusing first on victims in Florida, which took the brunt of one of the strongest storms to make landfall in the United States. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden plan to visit the state on Wednesday.

    Flooded roadways and washed-out bridges to barrier islands left many people isolated amid limited cellphone service and a lack of basic amenities such as water, electricity and the internet. And officials warned that the situation in many areas isn’t expected to improve for several days because all of the rain that fell has nowhere to go since waterways are overflowing.

    Nearly 850,000 homes and businesses were still without electricity Sunday, down from a peak of 2.67 million.

    Criswell told “Fox News Sunday” that the federal government began to arrange the “largest amount of search and rescue assets that I think we’ve ever put in place before” to supplement Florida’s resources.

    Even so, recovery will take time, said Criswell, who visited the state on Friday and Saturday to assess the damage and talk to survivors. She cautioned that dangers remain.

    “We worry a lot about the direct impacts from the storm itself as it is making landfall, but we see so many more injuries and sometimes more fatalities after the storm,” Criswell said. “People need to stay vigilant right now. Standing water brings with it all kinds of hazards — it has debris, it could have power lines, it could have hazards in there that you just don’t know about.”

    At least 54 people have been confirmed dead: 47 in Florida, four in North Carolina and three in Cuba. The weakened storm drifted north on Sunday and was expected to dump rain on parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, according to the National Hurricane Center, which warned of the potential for flash-flooding.

    More than 1,000 people have been rescued from flooded areas along Florida’s southwestern coast alone, Daniel Hokanson, a four-star general and head of the National Guard, told The Associated Press.

    In rural Seminole County, north of Orlando, residents donned waders, boots and bug spray to paddle to their flooded homes on Sunday.

    Ben Bertat found 4 inches (10 centimeters) of water in his house by Lake Harney after kayaking there.

    “I think it’s going to get worse because all of this water has to get to the lake” said Bertat, pointing to the water flooding a nearby road. “With ground saturation, all this swamp is full and it just can’t take any more water. It doesn’t look like it’s getting any lower.”

    Gabriel Madling kayaked through several feet of water on his street, delivering sandbags to stave off water that had crept to his doorstep.

    “My home is close to underwater,” Madling said. “Right now, I’m just going to sandbag as much as I can and hope and pray.”

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday that multibillionaire businessman Elon Musk was providing some 120 Starlink satellites to “help bridge some of the communication issues.” Starlink, a satellite-based internet system created by Musk’s SpaceX, will provide high-speed connectivity.

    The bridge to Pine Island, the largest barrier island off Florida’s Gulf Coast, was destroyed by the storm, leaving it accessible only by boat or air. Some flew out by helicopter.

    An aerial photo of the Mad Hatter Restaurant on nearby Sanibel Island that was posted on social media shows a mostly vacant patch of sand where the restaurant used to be. The staff is safe, according to a message on the restaurant’s Facebook page.

    “The Mad Hatter Restaurant, unfortunately, is out at sea right now,” the Facebook page reads. “The best news from this devastating scene is that there is still land for us to rebuild.”

    Fort Myers Mayor Kevin Anderson on Sunday defended Lee County officials from accusations that they had been slow in ordering evacuations on Tuesday ahead of the storm, a day later than some other counties in the area did.

    “Warnings for hurricane season start in June. So there’s a degree of personal responsibility here. I think the county acted appropriately. The thing is, a certain percentage of people will not heed the warnings regardless,” Anderson said on the CBS show “Face the Nation.”

    Elsewhere, power remained knocked out to at least half of South Carolina’s Pawleys Island, a beach community roughly 75 miles (115 kilometers) up the coast from Charleston.

    In North Carolina, the storm downed trees and power lines. Two of the four deaths in the state were from storm-related vehicle crashes, and the others involved a man who drowned when his truck plunged into a swamp and another killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator in a garage.

    ———

    Associated Press reporters Rebecca Santana in Ft. Myers, and Brendan Farrington and Anthony Izaguirre in Tallahassee contributed to this report.

    ———

    For more AP coverage of Hurricane Ian: https://apnews.com/hub/hurricanes

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  • Authorities say 47 storm fatalities now confirmed in Florida, raising global death toll from Hurricane Ian to 54

    Authorities say 47 storm fatalities now confirmed in Florida, raising global death toll from Hurricane Ian to 54

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    Authorities say 47 storm fatalities now confirmed in Florida, raising global death toll from Hurricane Ian to 54

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  • Pine Island residents recount horror, fear as Ian bore down

    Pine Island residents recount horror, fear as Ian bore down

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    PINE ISLAND, Fla. — Paramedics and volunteers with a group that rescues people after natural disasters went door to door Saturday on Florida’s devastated Pine Island, offering to evacuate residents who spoke of the terror of riding out Hurricane Ian in flooded homes and howling winds.

    The largest barrier island off Florida’s Gulf Coast, Pine Island has been largely cut off from the outside world. Ian heavily damaged the only bridge to the island, leaving it only reachable by boat or air. For many, the volunteers from the non-profit Medic Corps were the first people they have seen from outside the island in days.

    Residents described the horror of being trapped in their homes as water kept rising. Joe Conforti became emotional as he recounted what happened, saying the water rose at least 8 to 10 feet (2.4-3 meters), and there were 4-foot (1.2-meter) waves in the streets.

    “The water just kept pounding the house and we watched, boats, houses — we watched everything just go flying by,” he said, as he fought back tears. “We’ve lost so much at this point.”

    Conforti said if it wasn’t for his wife, Dawn Conforti, he wouldn’t have made it. He said: “I started to lose sensibility, because when the water’s at your door and it’s splashing on the door and you’re seeing how fast it’s moving, there’s no way you’re going to survive that.”

    He said his wife had them get on top of a table to keep from getting swept away by the water. The next day, he said, they brought food to an older gentleman who lived on the next block, and they made sure to get him off the island on the first available boat.

    “He lost everything,” Joe Conforti said of the man. “He said that if we didn’t bring him the food, he was going to take his life that night because it was so bad.”

    Some residents shed tears as Medic Corps volunteers came to their doors and asked if they wanted to be evacuated on Saturday. Some declined the offer for now and asked for another day to pack their belongings. But others were anxious to get away immediately.

    Helen Koch blew her husband a kiss and mouthed the words “I love you” as she sat inside the Medic Corps helicopter that lifted her and seven of the couple’s 17 dogs to safety from the decimated island. The dogs were in cages, strapped to the outside of the helicopter as it took off.

    Her husband, Paul Koch, stayed behind with the other dogs, and planned to leave the isolated island on a second trip. He told The Associated Press that days earlier, he didn’t think they would make it, as the major hurricane raged and the house began taking on water.

    Pine Island has long been known for its quiet, small-town atmosphere and mangrove trees. It’s a popular destination for fishing, kayaking and canoeing. Now, bleak scenes of destruction are everywhere in this shattered paradise.

    Houses have been reduced to splinters and boats have been tossed onto roadways. The island has no power, and no running water – save for a few hours on Friday when one resident said they were able to take a shower. A community of mobile homes was destroyed.

    The Medic Corps volunteers went to one house to search for a woman who was known to have stayed behind during the storm and has had no contact with her friends since. Inside the woman’s house, heavy furniture had been toppled over and her belongings were tossed about. There was no sign of the woman, raising fears she had been sucked out of her home by the storm surge.

    Linda Hanshaw said the tight-knit island community is amazing and “everyone I know who hasn’t left is trying to leave.”

    But that wasn’t true for everyone. Kathleen Russell was trying to persuade her elderly husband to leave, but he didn’t want to budge just yet. The couple kept declining offers to evacuate. The couple said they were not ready, but might be willing to leave on Sunday.

    Claire St. Leger said she had nine people in her house, including neighbors, as the storm came in.

    “I thought for sure we were all dying,” she said. “I just sat in an inside room with pillows, I crossed myself so many times, I thought for sure we were dying. Water kept rising.”

    Medic Corps is a nonprofit group of pilots, paramedics, doctors, a Navy SEAL and other volunteers that responds to natural disasters and gets people to safety. According to the organization’s website, it began in 2013 in response to Super Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines and in 2017 it began deploying aircraft and responders to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

    ———

    Forliti reported from Minneapolis.

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  • Governor’s office reports at least 4 N.C. storm fatalities

    Governor’s office reports at least 4 N.C. storm fatalities

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    RALEIGH, N.C. — The remnants of Hurricane Ian downed trees and power lines across North Carolina, and authorities reported at least four fatalities Saturday connected to the severe weather.

    In Johnston County, outside of Raleigh, a woman found her husband dead early Saturday morning after he went to check on a generator running in their garage overnight, sheriff’s office Capt. Jeff Caldwell said.

    Carbon monoxide levels also were high inside the home, and the woman was checked out at a hospital, according to Caldwell.

    Also in Johnston County, two young adults died in traffic collisions during stormy and wet conditions Friday, Gov. Roy Cooper’s office said in a news release. In eastern North Carolina’s Martin County, a 22-year-old man drowned when his truck left the roadway and submerged in a flooded swamp, the news release said.

    “We mourn with the families of those who have died and urge everyone to be cautious while cleaning up to avoid more deaths or injuries,” Cooper said in a statement.

    The highway patrol responded to over 1,400 calls for service and 784 collisions between midnight Friday and early Saturday morning, a spokesman said. Not all were necessarily weather-related.

    There were no initial reports of major structural damage, though nearly 73,000 people across the state were without power Saturday evening, according to a state outage map. That was down from over 330,000 earlier in the day.

    The National Weather Service warned that hazardous conditions remained along the coast, including the possibility of flooding and rip currents.

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