Kalain Hosein
The death toll associated with Hurricane Ian continued to rise across Florida as the powerful storm made its third and final landfall across South Carolina on Friday evening.
Florida officials have identified over three dozen deaths linked to the storm, and they said yesterday that the toll is expected to rise as damage assessments continue.
Ian first affected Florida near Fort Myers Beach as a powerful Category 4 hurricane on Wednesday with catastrophic winds up to 240 kilometres per hour, storm surge up to 18 feet and torrential rainfall.
States of emergency are in effect for Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, where Ian quickly weakened after making landfall as a Category 1 Hurricane between Charleston and Myrtle Beach.
Three days after its worst effects spread across the southeastern United States, over 1.7 million people are without power in Florida. At the same time, nearly 400,000 suffered outages across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia.
Guardian Media checked in with several Trinidadians living across the southeastern United States since Ian hit and all have fared safely.
Trinidadians Wayne and Rekha Balkaran-Bolai, who live in Jacksonville, Florida, experienced gusts and heavy rains but no significant impacts.
By Thursday night, Balkaran-Bolai said, “The weather has significantly improved where I am. It just has light rain and very little wind.” Jacksonville was under multiple weather warnings through the last week, including a Tropical Storm Warning and Storm Surge Warning.
Closer to the storm’s path, another Trinidadian, Wayne LeBlanc, in Orlando, Florida, said it was “more windy than rainy” but ultimately, he said, “No blemishes. All’s well.”
Other parts of Orlando were not as fortunate, as multiple rivers remain at record highs with historic flooding unfolding across the state.
Though Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he could not yet give a damage estimate, the risk modelling firm Karen Clark and Company said total economic damage, including uninsured property, infrastructure and clean-up in Florida alone could be over US$100 billion.
At 5 pm yesterday, Ian became a post-tropical cyclone across South Carolina. It still produced 110 kilometres per hour winds and carried a considerable flash flood threat for the US Mid-Atlantic.
The National Hurricane Centre said, “Ian should continue to weaken overnight and dissipate over western North Carolina or Virginia late tomorrow.”