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Hurricane Ian’s Death Toll Continues to Climb

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Hurricane Ian updates: Startling footage continues to emerge of the powerful storm as it struck southwest Florida, and the devastating destruction it left in its wake.
What began as a relatively quiet hurricane season in the Atlantic is quiet no more, after Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday as a Category 4 storm, one of the strongest to make landfall in the U.S. in years. The storm killed dozens of people, mostly across Florida, where residents and authorities are still struggling to pick up the pieces. Ian struck the Carolinas on Friday, and more flash flooding caused by the remnants of the massive storm could strike in the the central Appalachians and mid-Atlantic region over the weekend, warns the National Hurricane Center. Below is a look at the storm’s impact thus far, the recovery efforts, and the most stunning footage of the destruction it the storm caused in Florida.
Water rescues continued across Florida on Saturday, where more than 1,100 people have been plucked from the floodwaters since Ian struck midweek. NBC News reports that at least 77 storm-related deaths have been confirmed as of Saturday, almost all in Florida, where still-flooded waterways are hampering recovery efforts. The New York Times reports that at least 35 people have been confirmed dead just in Florida’s Lee County, where Ian made landfall. Lee County was the last county in the region to issue evacuation orders, after local officials apparently assumed, for too long, that the storm would strike further north on the coast as was originally forecast.
Ian forced multiple rivers over their banks across Florida, and 11 river gauges still reported major flooding on Saturday. On Friday night in southwest Florida, part of Interstate 75 was temporarily shut down over concerns it would be inundated by the rising Myakka River.
More than a million customers remain without power in Florida as of Saturday night, according to Poweroutage.net, including 100 percent of customers in Lee and Charlotte Counties where the storm hit hardest.
The remnants of Ian continue to affect the Carolinas, where the storm knocked out power for some 850,000 customers on Friday, and caused significant coastal flooding, particularly in South Carolina. Four people were killed in North Carolina on Friday mostly in storm-related car accidents.
Ian was briefly downgraded to a tropical storm on Thursday after losing steam traveling over Florida. But Thursday night, its winds rose again to the level of a Category 1 hurricane as it traveled over the Atlantic toward South Carolina, where it it made landfall on Friday afternoon, bringing what may be as much as a seven-foot storm surge to the coast north of Charleston.

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