Even so, DeSantis pointed to numerous public warnings earlier this week that Ian posed a catastrophic danger to the Tampa Bay flood region, which had not been directly affected by a major hurricane in more than a century.
“When we went to bed Monday night, people were saying it was a direct hit on Tampa Bay — worst-case scenario for the state,” DeSantis said at a Fort Myers press briefing on Saturday.
The Republican governor’s defense is part of what could become a long debate about the region’s warnings and preparations for Ian, one of the most destructive hurricanes to ever hit the United States.
The storm hit 18 years after another Category 4 hurricane, Charley, also crashed ashore in southwest Florida after it was predicted to hit Tampa Bay. This incident has prompted meteorologists and emergency officials to warn against focusing too obsessively on the “skinny black line” of a hurricane forecast path, urging people to pay more attention to the longer band. off the expected winds and waves.
Other hurricanes, including Sandy in 2012, have prompted changes in National Weather Service communications strategies and raised questions about the adequacy of the United States’ computerized hurricane models.
Ian killed at least 44 people, according to reports from state medical examiners. Some media reports have put the total death toll as high as 50, and the number is sure to climb.
Parts of Lee County, including Fort Myers, which is close to where the hurricane made landfall, suffered catastrophic damage from the storm, with buildings flattened, streets flooded and blocks of homes whole reduced to rubble.
“Predicting the path of this storm has not been an easy task,” Lee County Executive Roger Desjarlais said when announcing the evacuation on Facebook at 1:40 p.m. Tuesday.
The hurricane center first warned Sept. 23, five days before landfall, that all of south and central Florida was within the potential area of a hurricane from Ian, which at the time was a tropical depression north of Venezuela.
On Sunday, September 25, the hurricane center predicted a strike on Taylor County in northern Florida – more than 300 miles from Fort Myers – although southwest Florida is still in the larger cone where landing was possible. As late as Tuesday morning, the agency predicted Ian’s core would likely hit the Tampa area, about 120 miles north of Fort Myers. Several news outlets followed suit by positioning news crews in the Tampa area in preparation for the storm, as they had done before Charley.
Still, federal meteorologists warned people not to “focus on the exact track,” adding that “significant winds, storm surges and chance of precipitation will spread away from the center.” The agency has repeatedly warned that Ian’s long-term trajectory is unusually uncertain, with several predictive computer models showing very different paths Ian could take. They noted that only a slight change in the storm’s northeast cutting path could make a big difference in where it landed.
Ahead of the storm, the National Weather Service issued updates warning that “potentially deadly” storm surges were threatening much of Florida’s Gulf Coast, with areas between Tampa and Fort Myers most at risk. Monday afternoon, the National Weather Service in Tampa has issued updates saying these high-risk areas – which included Lee and Charlotte counties where the storm made landfall – could face winds of up to 111 mph, destruction of mobile homes, storm surges of 5 to 10 feet and severe flooding on low escape routes.
The Lee County Emergency Operations Center tweeted the same National Weather Service update warning of the hazards on Monday. But the county only ordered a limited evacuation Tuesday morning. He issued an urgent evacuation order in the middle of the afternoon.
On Wednesday morning, just hours before the storm made landfall, the governor was warning people to shelter in place, saying ‘safe evacuation is no longer possible. [in some areas]. It’s time to retreat and prepare for this storm.
Kevin Guthrie, director of Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, said the storm’s path was very difficult to predict and state officials were making decisions with the best information they had at the time. .
“Lee County was not actually notified that it was going to be the center of this case for about 36 to 48 hours,” he said during a Friday briefing.
DeSantis, during that same briefing, also said local officials acted appropriately given the data they had.
“I think from a southwest Florida perspective, as the storm moved in, they made calls and they were helping people get to shelters, they opened up their shelters, they did this what they had to do,” he said.
He added that, as a sign of the storm’s unpredictability, some people in Tampa even tried to escape the storm by driving south to Fort Myers.
State officials said more than 1,300 search and rescue personnel were working Saturday to find survivors, including five teams from out of state. As of Friday, search and rescue teams had rescued about 700 survivors, state officials said. President Joe Biden, describing the effort during a hurricane briefing on Friday, said six fixed-wing aircraft, 18 boats and 16 helicopters were deployed.
Sanibel Island on the southwest coast was particularly affected, with storm surges during the storm reaching between 8 and 15 feet. The main 3 mile causeway to the island was badly damaged cutting off access to the community. DeSantis previously said barges were ferrying heavy equipment to the island to help clean up the rubble.
Brigadier General Daniel Hibner, commander of the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Southern Atlantic Division, said Saturday the agency had placed a survey vessel near the Sanibel area to assess operational and navigational boundaries “in order to better understand who we are. face to face.
More than 1.1 million homes and businesses were left without power on Saturday, although the number was down significantly from the 2.6 million that were without power at the height of the storm.
“We have a long way to go,” Florida Power & Light president and CEO Eric Silagy said Saturday. Florida Power & Light is the state’s largest utility.
Hurricane Ian made landfall for the second time in South Carolina on Friday near Georgetown, a town about 60 miles north of Charleston. Ian eventually weakened into a post-tropical cyclone as it moved north.
Ten hospitals along Florida’s Gulf Coast were evacuating patients in the aftermath of the storm, some of whom were in local forced evacuation areas. As many of the state’s more than 200 hospitals are tested battling hurricanes, Florida Hospital Association President and CEO Mary Mayhew pointed to the difficulty of removing sick patients from facilities.
“It’s incredibly disruptive to evacuate patients,” Mayhew said.
Arek Sarkissian and Gloria Gonzalez contributed to this report.