SANIBEL ISLAND, Fla. — Rotting fish and garbage lie scattered in Sanibel Island’s streets. On the mainland, debris from washed-away homes is heaped in a canal like matchsticks. Huge shrimp boats sit perched amid the remains of a mobile home park.
“Think of a snow globe. Pick it up and shake it — that’s what happened,” Fred Szott said.
For the past three days, he and his wife Joyce have been making trips to their damaged mobile home in Fort Myers, cleaning up after Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida’s Gulf Coast.
As for the emotional turbulence, he says: “You either hold on or you lose it.”
The number of storm-related deaths rose to at least 101 on Thursday, eight days after the storm made landfall in southwest Florida. According to reports from the Florida Medical Examiners Commission, 98 of those deaths were in Florida. Five people were also killed in North Carolina, three in Cuba and one in Virginia.
Ian is the second-deadliest storm to hit the mainland United States in the 21st century, behind Hurricane Katrina, which left more than 1,800 people dead in 2005. The deadliest hurricane ever to hit the U.S. was the Great Galveston Hurricane in 1900 that killed as many as 8,000 people.
Residents of Florida’s devastated barrier islands are starting to return, assessing the damage to homes and businesses despite limited access to some areas.
The broken causeway to Sanibel Island might not be passable until the end of the month. In the meantime, residents like Pamela Brislin arrived by boat to see what they could salvage.
Brislin stayed through the storm, but is haunted by what happened afterward. When she checked on a neighbor, she found the woman crying. Her husband had passed away, his body laid out on a picnic table until help could arrive. Another neighbor’s house caught fire. The flames were so large that they forced Breslin to do what the hurricane could not — flee with her husband and a neighbor’s dog.
Ian, a Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour, unleashed torrents of rain and caused extensive flooding and damage. The deluge turned streets into gushing rivers. Backyard waterways overflowed into neighborhoods, sometimes by more than a dozen feet, tossing boats onto yards and roadways. Beaches disappeared, as ocean surges pushed shorelines far inland.
Some 185,000 customers remain without electricity, down from highs above 2.6 million across the state.
