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Historic Hurricane Ian has already killed “hundreds” of people in Florida, a sheriff in the hardest-hit region revealed early Thursday — but the death toll is expected to swell as Floridians wake up to assess the true extent of the destruction in daylight.
“This is a life-changing event for all of us, Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno told “Good Morning America.”
“I don’t have confirmed numbers — I definitely know the fatalities are in the hundreds,” he added.
“So far, confirmed in the hundreds,” he said, noting that conditions were too dire for his officers and other rescuers to get a true sense of the disaster.
“There are thousands of people that are waiting to be rescued. And again, cannot get a true assessment until we’re actually on scene assessing each scene, and we can’t access people that’s the problem,” he said.
The sheriff warned that rescue crews are going to “see things they’ve never seen before” as he noted the masses of drownings.
Lee County Manager Roger Desjarlais had said late Wednesday that the storm was “too strong” for them to properly survey the damage.
“We are beginning to get a sense that our community has been, in some respects, decimated,” he said that night.
More than 80% of the area was also without power, further hampering any rescue attempts, County Commissioner Kevin Ruane had said.
