Florida, Carolinas count the cost of Hurricane ‘Ian’

FORT MYERS/CHARLESTON—Florida, North and South Carolina were on Saturday trying to recover from the destruction wrought by Hurricane “Ian,” after one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the US mainland caused tens of billions of dollars in damage and killed more than 20 people. Ian, now a posttropical cyclone, was weakening but still forecast to bring treacherous conditions to parts of the Carolinas, Virginia and West Virginia into Saturday morning, according to the National Hurricane Center. “The dangerous storm surge, flash flooding and high wind threat continues,” it said. The storm struck Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, turning beach towns into disaster areas. On Friday, it pummeled waterfront Georgetown, north of the historic city of Charleston in South Carolina, with wind speeds of 140 kilometers per hour. Roads were flooded and blocked by trees while a number of piers were damaged. Around 1.7 million homes and businesses were without power in the Carolinas and Florida at 2:30 a.m. ET, according to tracking website PowerOutage.us. There have been reports of at least 21 deaths, Kevin Guthrie, director of the state’s Division of Emergency Management, said on Friday morning, stressing that some of those remained unconfirmed. Some 10,000 people were unaccounted for, he said, but many of them were likely in shelters or without power.