Hurricane
Ian
took about 24 hours to cover the 450 kilometers that separate Key West, where it made landfall on Wednesday at around three in the afternoon, and Saint Augustine, the last town in Florida on which it unleashed its fury.
"That damned storm took its time," said Martha, a nurse by profession, on Monday before the house where she spent three days with the water at calf height and unable to go out in Daytona Beach, a vacation city for an hour south of Saint Augustine.
On Wednesday the wind uprooted the enormous oak in the garden.
On Friday the Army finally arrived.
And on Saturday he passed him from one shelter to another, looking for help.
Daytona Beach is in the extreme northeast of Florida, and it was the next to last stop on
Ian's destructive journey,
a trip that takes about five hours by car
.
The fearsome hurricane reached the end of its path with its smoke lowered, turned into a tropical storm, but with one last cartridge to spend: the same phenomenon, attributable to climate change, that made it embolden with unprecedented force before reaching The United States, due to the heat of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, caused it to rearm once it reached the Atlantic to attack the Carolinas with, again, a hurricane category.
In North Carolina, four victims were claimed.
In addition to leaving Martha's neighborhood incommunicado,
Ian
, which has caused, according to calculations on Monday night, at least 100 deaths in Florida, in its last blows on the peninsula, the robust wall of a hotel on the beach in Daytona, where these days the curious approached to surrender to the evidence of the force of the cyclone.
In Saint Augustine, the wind pushed the sea out to sea, until it flooded much of its historic area.
And for once, the adjective is not a way to disguise the youth of the United States: this picturesque town attracts tourists as the oldest settlement in the country, founded by the Spanish in 1565. Sylvia, a Cuban from Matanzas who works in a sentry box that offers excursions to visitors in front of the castle of San Marcos, showed this Monday the mark left by the water at the passage of
Ian,
about 80 centimeters high.
A sign in Fort Myers Beach warns would-be looters that they will be shot at.
BEAUTIFUL FRAME (REUTERS)
The water, more than the wind, has become the calm after the storm in the biggest problem for Florida.
It is in Kissimmee, in the central part of the State, where the lake has wiped out Jay and Chris's airboat cruise business, and it is in Saint Cloud, where some 150 families were evicted on Sunday because of the floods in a suburban development, when they already believed that the worst was over.
Michael O'Connor, of course, did not count on spending Monday night with his “five children in an Airb'n'b”, but he had no choice.
The explanation for O'Connor's problems has a name: compound flood.
This is what happens when the overflows caused by the storm surge of the hurricane prevent the rivers from reaching the sea because they are at their maximum capacity due to the heavy rains, stronger than expected, because, again, of climate change, according to a study published this year.
Both towns are separated by roads that the water threatens from the gutters, south of Orlando, where the effects of Ian
were also felt
: the neighbors have asked them not to spend more running water than is strictly necessary, there are still hotels with entire floors closed due to humidity and in some areas of the city the electricity did not return until Sunday (there are still 461,000 clients, according to PowerOutage.us, without supply in Florida, where they reached 2.6 million).
At least, the extraordinary economic engine of the Disney World park has been open since last Friday.
The journey through the devastation, which includes another iconic landmark, Cape Canaveral, where NASA took measures to minimize the damage, begins in the barrier islands off the coast of southwest Florida, which have suffered the most damage: Fort Myers Beach, whose access is still restricted, and Sanibel and Captiva, still cut off by land with the peninsula, because the hurricane split the highway, its umbilical cord, in half.
It is in those incomparable settings converted into nightmarish places where most of the deceased have been registered from an account that is far from having been closed.
More than half of the dead, 54 so far, lost their lives in Lee County: in addition to the islands, in places like Fort Myers city, Naples, Cape Coral or Bonita Beach.
There, rescue services are still combing homes door-to-door for survivors, as authorities face accusations of taking a day too long to issue a mandatory evacuation order.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ducked Sunday saying that sooner or later, many Southwest residents would still have decided to stay home and ride out the downpour.
Trailers from a campground flooded in Arcadia, Florida, on Monday. Gerald Herbert (AP)
A part of those affected by
Ian
explained these days on the ground that they were convinced to stay by a mix of confusing information (meteorologists predicted that the hurricane would land further north, in the Tampa area) and the kind of reckless confidence that gives believe experienced in natural catastrophes.
The rest?
Many were wealthy people for whom Florida is their second home, or they found a way to spend a few days with family or friends in cities like Chicago or New York.
After devastating the towns that the media has focused on over the weekend,
Ian
took it on his way northeast, in the direction of Daytona Beach and Saint Augustine, with the counties of Charlotte (24 dead) and Sarasota (four ), where the water flooded entire neighborhoods in towns such as North Port or Arcadia.
In them, some neighbors still have to access their houses aboard canoes and being careful not to meet alligators, whose routines have also been ruined by
Ian
.
This is no time to fall ill in this corner of Florida.
There are hospitals in the area that are still not working due to power outages and lack of drinking water, and many patients are being diverted to other parts of the state.
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