Florida’s death toll from Hurricane Ian tops 100
At least 54 people died in Lee County alone, Sheriff Carmine Marceno said Monday – up from the county’s previously announced death toll of 42 – and officials there are facing questions about whether evacuation orders should have been issued earlier. Twenty-four deaths were recorded in Charlotte County – up from 12.
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Now, as blue skies return, Floridians who took shelter while the hurricane raged have emerged – many of them still without power or clean drinking water...
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Nearly 600,000 homes, businesses and other customers in Florida still did not have power as of early Monday afternoon, according to PowerOutage.us. Many are without clean tap water, with well over 100 boil-water advisories in places around the state, according to Florida Health Department data.
Questions over timing of evacuation orders as deaths mount
Lee County officials have faced criticism about why the first mandatory evacuations weren’t ordered until a day before Ian’s landfall, despite an emergency plan which suggests evacuations should have happened earlier.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Lee County officials acted appropriately when they issued their first mandatory evacuations on Tuesday, less than 24 hours before Hurricane Ian made landfall on the barrier island Cayo Costa, and a day after several neighboring counties issued their orders.
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“When that evacuation order came, we’re like, ’24 hours, that’s not a lot. But we’ll still kind of make it. And it wasn’t until Wednesday morning when we woke up and saw that it had made another adjustment. And at that point, it’s just too late."-- Pastor Shawn Critser, Fort Myers Beach.
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Sheriff Carmine Marceno stood by the handling of the evacuation orders Monday, saying he was “confident in our county manager, our leaders, our governor, all of us in law enforcement that we got that message out at the right time.”
Well...Sheriff Acevedo...MARCENO, sorry, you didn't get the "message out at the right time" for 100+, did you?
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...I’m confident in the decisions that were made. And like I said yesterday, stand by them, and I wouldn’t change anything.”
Total cop talk, total Trump talk. Never admit error.