Florida
Live updates: Hurricane Ian barrels toward South Carolina after slamming Florida
Town of Fort Myers Seashore on Florida’s southwest coast was leveled by Hurricane Ian, an area politician mentioned late Thursday.
“I made it about two-thirds down the island and I might say 90% of the island is just about gone,” Fort Myers Seashore City Councilman Dan Allers tells CNN’s Don Lemon. “Until you may have a high-rise apartment or a more recent concrete dwelling that’s constructed to the identical requirements at the moment, your own home is just about gone.”
Town, with a inhabitants of round 5,600 individuals, is on Estero Island within the Gulf of Mexico.
Many individuals struggled to get to larger floor amid the storm surge, Allers mentioned.
“I’ve heard tales of individuals getting in freezers and floating the freezers to a different dwelling … and being rescued by larger houses,” Allers mentioned.
As a substitute of the place houses stood, there’s solely rubble, the council member mentioned.
“Each dwelling just about on the seaside is gone,” Allers mentioned. “Among the houses on the facet streets are utterly gone, and there is nothing however a gap with water,” he mentioned.
Allers, who evacuated to larger floor through the storm, later found that his own residence was misplaced.
“Every little thing clearly inside was gone,” he mentioned, though the construction survived. “We’d be capable of rebuild,” he added.