Ian is probably Florida’s deadliest hurricane
since 1935. Most victims drowned.
“Nene died right there with us,” said Chanel Maston, 48, sobbing as she recounted the ordeal. “She took her last breaths with us.”
“I don’t want to scare people, but they need to understand: The leading cause of death is going to be drowning,” said W. Craig Fugate, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Florida Division of Emergency Management. “Storm surge doesn’t sound inherently deadly unless you understand it.”
Drowning is a horrible way to die. Did these people deserve this?
As stories of death emerged from the destruction in southwest Florida, President Biden, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and local authorities have clashed over Ian’s casualty toll. Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno told “Good Morning America” that deaths could range into the hundreds. Biden warned that Ian could be the “deadliest hurricane in Florida’s history.” The governor has downplayed deaths in daily briefings, saying the tropical cyclone’s numbers will not come near the 1928 hurricane that killed a record 2,500.
Is that the standard in 2022, what the death toll was 94 years ago? Okay, governor, it's "only" the deadliest in the last 87 years. Make a political commercial out of it. Downplaying deaths is right out of the DeSantis playbook. He did it with COVID, he's doing it with hurricanes.
DeSantis at first indicated that indirect deaths might not be counted.
“For example, in Charlotte County, they recorded a suicide during the storm,” he said the day after the storm. “They also had somebody pass away from a heart attack because you don’t have access to emergency services.”
But the agency tasked with cataloguing the deaths, the Florida Medical Examiners Commission, adheres to a broader definition.
“We include motor vehicle accidents if someone is trying to evacuate and they hydroplane,” spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said. “If someone had a heart attack when medical services were down. … If there was any suspicion it was related to a hurricane, that’s a storm death.”
Critics have slammed Lee County authorities for not ordering Fort Myers Beach residents to evacuate more swiftly.
“There’s a saying in the industry that you run from water and hide from wind,” said John Renne, the director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. “We need to do a much better job of conveying the risk in storm-surge areas.”
And this governor told people the Wednesday morning of the storm making landfall not to run, but to hunker down, that it was "too late."
Mitch Pacyna, 74, a resident of Fort Myers Beach, had weathered 27 years of tropical storms. His social life was so packed that Pacyna’s friends jokingly referred to him as “the mayor.”
On Facebook, he documented the storm’s approach, noting that the forecast had suggested Ian would veer toward Tampa. When county officials ordered his barrier island to empty before the hurricane struck, Pacyna opted to stay behind.
“Oh my God ... wrong decision,” he lamented in a video as water swept his street. Soon enough, the tide crashed into the home he shared with his partner, Mary, and wiped away the bar he’d built in his garage.
Pacyna’s last post: “WE’RE TERRIFIED.”
His family announced his death the next day.
There was little left of the vacation house that Nishelle Harris-Miles’s friends and family had booked for her birthday.
The women from Dayton, Ohio, had heard Ian was barreling toward Tampa Bay and figured the airline or rental owner would cancel on them if the storm posed a real threat to Fort Myers Beach.
They had arrived the Tuesday before Ian struck and tried to make the most of it: dancing indoors, snapping silly photos, singing “Happy Birthday.”
“We were smashed against the ceiling,” Maston said of what came next. “We were fighting the ceiling, and there was water everywhere. Next thing you know, the roof went down, and we went with it.”
They were stranded in the debris for 14 hours, she estimated. Eventually, someone heard their cries, built a makeshift plank and pulled them out. A rescuer who descended from a helicopter confirmed what Maston already knew: Nene was dead.
“We didn’t want to leave her behind,” she said.
Nene was the mother of two sons and two daughters. A home health aide who cared about her patients. A tourist who had saved up for that trip.
“We could never have imagined,” Maston said. “I saw bodies hanging out of windows. I’d never seen stuff like this — only on TV.”
She wept.
“We didn’t know,” she said. “We just didn’t know.”
How can the president say, as he did today, that Governor DeSantis was doing a "good job"? The southwest coast of Florida is destroyed, the people in zombie-like grief. DeSantis is gaslighting and Biden is being gaslit.
Ugly, just UGLY.
