Hurricane IanIan Becomes a Hurricane Again as It Takes Aim at South Carolina

Florida was still reeling from its hit by Ian, as hundreds of people were being rescued from floodwaters across the state. Our reporters are on the ground.

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The New York Times

Here’s what to know about Ian right now.

Damage from Hurricane Ian was coming into clearer view in southwest Florida on Thursday evening, Gov. Ron DeSantis said as he described cars floating in water and concrete slabs where houses once stood. Emergency crews continued to work to reach stranded residents, with more than 700 people already rescued. Ian moved out over the Atlantic and strengthened into a hurricane. The storm was expected to make landfall on Friday in South Carolina.

The latest:

  • State and federal officials said they expected deaths connected to the storm, but no firm total had emerged by Thursday night.

  • Fort Myers Beach, in southwest Florida, was hit especially hard, Mr. DeSantis said. “Some of the homes were wiped out,” he said. “Some of it was just concrete slabs.”

  • About 2.6 million customers were still without power in Florida.

  • Ian was expected to hit South Carolina on Friday. The National Weather Service warned that it could produce life-threatening floods in Georgia and the Carolinas.

John Yoon
Sept. 29, 2022, 11:37 p.m. ET

President Biden declared an emergency in South Carolina and ordered federal assistance as Ian moved toward the state, according to a White House statement. Rain has begun falling in parts of South Carolina and Georgia and will move inland overnight and continue through tomorrow, the National Weather Service said.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Sept. 29, 2022, 11:02 p.m. ET

Reporting from Tampa, Fla.

Hurricane Ian cut a man off from his oxygen. A neighborhood sprung into action.

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Paramedics and volunteers provided aid to a man who ran out of oxygen in North Fort Myers, Florida.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

NORTH FORT MYERS, Fla. — The people in the Hideaway trailer park in North Fort Myers often look out for each other. So, when uprooted trees took down power lines in the wake of Hurricane Ian, the park’s manager decided to check on a resident who relies on oxygen.

The man, an Army and Marine Corps veteran, was struggling and couldn’t access his oxygen tank, said Tony Moore, a maintenance worker who went with the park’s manager and recounted the story.

They called emergency services, but more than an hour later, no help had arrived. But members of the United Cajun Navy, a volunteer group of military veterans who travel to help people during disasters, had also received a call. Courtney Allen, one of the volunteers, called the man and heard him meekly say “please hurry.”

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Keisha Boyd, a volunteer with the Cajun Navy in North Fort Myers, Fla., on Thursday.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Paramedics arrived at the same time as the volunteers, who helped them find the man’s home and avoid the downed power lines. A paramedic, Dustin McJury, gave him a squeeze bottle of oxygen that would last six hours, but urged neighbors and volunteers to find access to a generator and an extension cord.

Ron Richards had moved in a couple of weeks ago and had bought a generator that day, and Israel Benites heard people asking around for an extension cord and came outside with one that could stretch from Mr. Richards’s generator to the man’s apartment.

“We have a good neighborhood,” Mr. Benites, 26, said as he stood in a driveway full of puddles and debris from the storm. “I help people, and people help me.”

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Patricia Mazzei
Sept. 29, 2022, 9:30 p.m. ET

‘There’s no state taxes. But oh my goodness.’

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Children playing in floodwaters in Fort Myers, Fla.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

FORT MYERS, Fla. — When Diane Dorsey saw a river rushing out the front door of her house on Wednesday in the low-lying neighborhood of The Forest — and another surging out her back door — she told her daughter and husband to take food and family photos and head upstairs. She also made sure they took a hatchet.

“In case we have to bust up into the ceiling and be on the roof,” she told them.

After sweeping water out her front door, Ms. Dorsey recounted this story under somewhat more serene circumstances Thursday, while chatting with a neighbor, Steve Nanda, on the sidewalk. Water still sloshed about, but Ms. Dorsey and Mr. Nanda, relative to other residents on their street, considered themselves fortunate — their indoor damage was minimal.

Ms. Dorsey, 57, who owns a graphic design business, checked the houses of three families who had evacuated. In one home, the hardwood floors and furniture were destroyed. In another, water idled chest deep.

The Forest, which also severely flooded in 2017 during Hurricane Harvey, was in a mandatory evacuation zone for Ian. But Ms. Dorsey and Mr. Nanda, 50, said that by the time the orders came, it was too late for their families to make a plan to leave. Ms. Dorsey did not even know until a few days ago that her house was in Evacuation Zone A.

“They kind of downplayed the severity of it,” Mr. Nanda said. “They got where it was going completely wrong.”

“We got slammed,” Ms. Dorsey agreed.

“I wish we had left,” Mr. Nanda said.

About four feet of water filled his garage. But he had managed to save his desktop computer — “I didn’t want to have to recreate my business records,” he said — and his son protected another prized possession, his Xbox.

Ms. Dorsey and her family moved to Fort Myers in 2019 from Maryland, considering it a pre-retirement adventure. She could not fathom the devastation that hurricanes wreak.

“This is our fourth year here,” she said. “It may be the last. Had I known this, I probably wouldn’t have come.”

The southwest Florida coast has swelled with new residents since Hurricane Charley, the strongest storm many people here remember, struck in 2004. Mr. Nanda, who came from Ohio by way of Wisconsin, arrived in 2013.

“There’s no state taxes,” Ms. Dorsey said. “But oh my goodness.”

Her 18-year-old daughter, Angel Dorsey, chimed in: “I like the snow better.”

Sept. 29, 2022, 8:53 p.m. ET

The staggering scale of wreckage becomes clearer in Florida.

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Nathan Andrews, the owner of a kitchen cabinet supply company, surveyed the wreckage of his warehouse in Cape Coral, Fla., the day after Hurricane Ian ripped through.CreditCredit...Jayme Gershen and Orlando Castro for The New York Times

FORT MYERS, Fla. — The extent of Hurricane Ian’s destruction became clearer on Thursday as people across southwestern Florida, left without electricity, drinking water or inhabitable homes, began to assess the damage and gird for what Gov. Ron DeSantis said would be a yearslong recovery.

The scale of the wreckage was staggering, even to Florida residents who had survived and rebuilt after other powerful hurricanes. The storm pulverized roads, toppled trees, gutted downtown storefronts and set cars afloat, leaving a soggy scar of ruined homes and businesses from the coastal cities of Naples and Fort Myers to inland communities around Orlando.

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Destruction from Hurricane Ian at Bonita Bill’s in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Although state officials had not released a death toll by late in the day, Mr. DeSantis said Thursday night that “we absolutely expect” to learn of storm-related fatalities as rescuers work through a backlog of 911 calls and scour the most devastated neighborhoods. More than 500 people in Charlotte and Lee Counties, the hardest hit, had been rescued on Thursday, the Florida Division of Emergency Management said; the small town of Fort Myers Beach, on a barrier island just off the coast, appeared decimated.

While Ian left Florida on Thursday afternoon as a tropical storm, South Carolina residents were bracing for lashing winds and heavy rain as it quickly became a hurricane again at sea; forecasters said it could strengthen again before doubling back onto land there by Friday.

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A volunteer checked on Marvis Long, 96, who rode out Hurricane Ian with her husband Harry as waist-deep water flowed into their home of more than 30 years in North Fort Myers.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times
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The causeway to Sanibel Island had a missing section and a collapsed section, said Jared Moskowitz, Florida’s former emergency management chief.Credit...Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Photos from several areas of the state showed homes crunched together in a chaotic jumble, or smashed into what looked like toothpicks. Fishing boats and pleasure cruisers had been hurled onto the ground as if they were bathtub toys. The streets were a perilous obstacle course of toppled trees and downed wires.

In North Fort Myers, where Marion Burkholder, 84, survived the storm by clambering into a dinghy inside a neighbor’s screened-in porch and floating up with the rising waters, Thursday brought dreaded news. Her carpets were sopping and her floors were covered with a dark brown liquid. Her fridge lay on its side.

“Everything floated,” said Marvis Long, 96, who lives nearby. “The water was coming in just like waves in here.”

Mayors, sheriffs and other officials surveying the damage struggled to even describe its scope. The sheriff in Volusia County, near Orlando on the state’s east coast, said by text message that the coastal county was seeing “unprecedented flooding.” Mr. DeSantis said there had been “biblical” storm surge on Sanibel Island, normally a tourist haven of gleaming beaches and mangroves southwest of Fort Myers.

“The damage that was done has been historic,” Mr. DeSantis said in a briefing on Thursday. “We’ve never seen a flood event like this. We’ve never seen storm surge of this magnitude.”

On Fort Myers Beach, a laid-back strip dotted with hotels, bars and restaurants that for many Southwest Florida residents offered a cherished escape from the mainland, the storm had laid waste to beloved landmarks, including the fishing pier and Times Square, the communal gathering spot where sunset was celebrated each night. Several residents of the island reported not hearing from friends who rode out the storm there.

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Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times
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James Grey looked for his house boat along the Caloosahatchee River in downtown Fort Myers.Credit...Kinfay Moroti for The New York Times

“When you look at Fort Myers Beach in particular, there’s no words to describe it,” Sheriff Carmine Marceno of Lee County said after taking a helicopter tour of his county, where Hurricane Ian came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane on Wednesday with winds up to 155 miles per hour.

The causeway to nearby Sanibel Island had a missing section and a collapsed section, said Jared Moskowitz, Florida’s former emergency management chief, who flew over the area on Thursday. “Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island look like they will need to be 80 percent rebuilt,” he estimated.

The storm’s heavy blow to infrastructure complicated efforts to gauge the damage — early estimates said insured losses could reach up to $40 billion — and to reach hard-hit barrier islands, where homes and businesses were now heaps of wood pulp and broken concrete. Cell service was spotty or nonexistent up and down the coast, another agonizing impediment to residents’ efforts to seek help or reach missing family members.

“You’re powerless to help,” said Julie Hittle, who lives in Texas and has been anxiously waiting for updates from her brother, who fled his flooding apartment in Naples by crawling out a window and onto the roof of a minivan.

When a flicker of cell service returned on Thursday evening, her brother, Chip Aldridge, 56, recounted how he, his fiancée and dog, Kobi, had walked two miles through the storm and ended up at a La Quinta Inn, where they were now staying because their apartment was a mildewy shambles. Mr. Aldridge had lost everything in Hurricane Irma in 2017, and was now facing the prospect of starting over, once again.

“We’re survivors,” Mr. Aldridge said in a telephone interview. “Last night was shock and just exhaustion. This morning was, OK, what’s next? Tomorrow we go face the actual reality.”

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Flooding in Port Charlotte, Fla., on Thursday. Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times
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A family slept on counter tops and tables to stay out of the water overnight in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. They kept a raft at their feet and planned to float if needed.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

The economic toll of the storm in a region heavily dependent on tourism and recreation was only beginning to be felt. Universal Studios in Orlando had not announced when it would reopen, though Disney said its theme parks appeared to have minimal structural damage and would start to reopen on Friday. On both the east and west coasts, beachside bars, boardwalks and piers that had been bustling with tourists a week ago were now a wasteland of muddy debris.

At least 2.6 million people remained without power on Thursday, though Florida officials said there were 20,000 utility workers poised to start getting power back on.

The storm severed sections of two bridges connecting mainland Florida to barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico and reduced some roads to rubble while littering others with trees and power lines. Rescuers were arriving by air and sea to reach people who had not evacuated.

Across the region on Thursday, people waded back home and trudged up muddy, debris-covered streets that had been raging waterways just a day earlier to see what, if anything, had survived.

In Port Charlotte, across a river from where the storm made landfall, Teresa Madden and her husband slipped on waders to slog through thigh-deep brown water — risking encounters with red ants, snakes and the two alligators known to live in the lake at their community for people 55 and older.

The water had spared most of the homes, but one had been destroyed by the wind, its roof gashed open to reveal the remnants of a dining room. A clock still hung on the wall, but most everything else lay in tatters on the sodden grass: a flower pot, socks, a festive tinsel leprechaun.

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Damage in San Carlos Island in Fort Meyers, Fla.Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times
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Atlas Dorlean, right, leaving her flooded neighborhood on a truck driven by volunteers in Fort Myers.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Elsewhere in the complex, Sarah Walters, 41, arrived in flip-flops and cutoff shorts to assess the damage to her mother’s house. It could have been worse, she said. But she still could not reach her mother, who had evacuated to her nurse’s house. Ms. Walters spent the storm at her own home about a mile away, with her husband and stepdaughter bracing against their front door for three hours to keep it from blowing in.

“We just have to figure out a way to fix things,” she said.

People who decided not to evacuate described harrowing escapes through chest-high floodwaters. Some made it out on a kayak or jet skied down a four-lane road. Some huddled on top of cars. Some had to flee to their second floors and watched couches and furniture float through their living rooms.

In Naples Park, Joe Lema, 76, and his wife, Joyce, 70, spent four hours trapped inside their house by the force and weight of the rising water outside. Unable to open the doors, they tried to break their expensive hurricane impact windows, to no avail. They called 911, but they were told it was too late.

“I said a lot of prayers,” Mrs. Lema said on Thursday. They had been in the evacuation zone but said nothing like this had ever happened since buying the home in 1986.

Chad Sulkes thought he had been prepared for the worst, having bought a generator, gas, food and a portable air-conditioner until Ian’s storm surge began to invade his home in Naples Park, forcing him to flee into the storm.

“There’s no items you can buy to prepare for that,” he said. “The only preparation is to leave.”

On Thursday, he returned to the house he rents on Seagull Drive to find it in complete disarray. His boat in the canal out back was sinking. All his furniture and belongings were strewn about, covered in mud. The floor was slick with mud tainted with gasoline.

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“The damage that was done has been historic,” Mr. DeSantis said in a briefing on Thursday. “We’ve never seen a flood event like this. We’ve never seen storm surge of this magnitude.”Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times
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Greg and Ann Jones surveyed the damage to their home in Estero, Fla.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Cities farther inland and along the Atlantic Coast appeared to have endured the storm’s lacerating winds with less damage than the southwestern coast where Ian first made landfall. But at points during the day, heavy rains fueled warnings from the National Weather Service of “widespread, life-threatening catastrophic flooding” in Central Florida.

At the Avante, an assisted-living facility in Orlando, rescuers sloshed through floods to evacuate the facility’s 100 residents, carrying some out on stretchers as rain and wind whirled around them. Some hospitals and nursing homes were managing to run on generator power while patients from at least 16 hospitals and an additional 3,500 nursing-home residents were evacuated from other facilities in southwestern Florida, industry officials said.

There were surreal moments of destruction mixed with normalcy. The streets of downtown Fort Myers were littered with plant matter and other debris from the surging Caloosahatchee River. But the waters had receded by Thursday afternoon and several restaurants were open and packed with people in undershirts, shorts and flip flops looking for something warm to eat.

Diane Dorsey, 57, and her family moved to Fort Myers in 2019 from Maryland, considering it a pre-retirement adventure, never imagining what devastation a hurricane could bring. When the storm sent one river rushing past the front of her house and another through the backyard, Ms. Dorsey ordered her daughter to grab the family photo albums and head upstairs.

Though their house did not sustain major damage, they were among the Floridians wondering on Thursday whether they should pack up and never return rather than risking a repeat disaster some day.

The Southwest Florida coast has swelled with new residents since Hurricane Charley, the strongest storm many people here remember, struck in 2004.

“There’s no state taxes,” Ms. Dorsey said. “But oh my goodness.”

Her 18-year-old daughter, Angel Dorsey, chimed in: “I like the snow better.”

Jennifer Reed contributed reporting from Fort Myers.

A correction was made on 
Sept. 30, 2022

An earlier version misstated the location of Hurricane Ian’s landfall in relation to Lee County. It was in Lee County, not to the south of the county.

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Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Sept. 29, 2022, 8:45 p.m. ET

Reporting from Tampa, Fla.

In Fort Myers, a homecoming helps a family cope.

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Atlas Dorlean exiting her flooded neighborhood on a truck driven by volunteers in Fort Myers, Fla.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Astrid Joseph embraced one of her daughters when she arrived at the front doorstep on Thursday afternoon after a two-day shift at an assisted living center during the hurricane. Her neighborhood was almost entirely submerged, with mailboxes nearly covered by murky water. Downed power lines blew in the breeze, and the occasional water snake swam by.

Ms. Joseph, who has five children in her household, said the water felt as if it were rising from beneath the floor on Wednesday as the storm surge reached her home.

“I don’t know where I’m going, so I stay,” Ms. Joseph said, explaining her decision not to flee. “I was really scared.”

Ms. Joseph and her daughters had torn out much of the ravaged carpet, and one daughter, Atlas Dorlean, 26, said she had used a bowl to scoop water out of a car that was only three years old, but now sat soggy on a patch of front lawn.

A few steps away, the water rose to knee-level. Only those with high-sitting trucks could still traverse the roadways, so those without were forced to walk, carrying pets above the water. Some others had friends or relatives pull them along in small rafts.

Ms. Dorlean, who is also employed at the assisted living center, said she was glad she had not been scheduled to work during the hurricane so that she could help her mother make it through.

“I care about my life right now,” Ms. Dorlean said from the back of a pickup truck driven by volunteers who were offering people safe rides. “If I wasn’t at home last night, I’d lose almost everything that’s important.”

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
Sept. 29, 2022, 8:09 p.m. ET

Reporting from Tampa, Fla.

A paramedic, Dustin McJury, told me while out on a call in North Fort Myers, Fla., that his shifts have felt like working in “a war zone.” He said he feared that many people did not survive the hurricane’s wrath.

Patricia Mazzei
Sept. 29, 2022, 8:08 p.m. ET

An expert view of Ian’s devastation from the air: ‘It’s a once-a-generation event.’

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Homes that were damaged when Hurricane Ian passed through Fort Myers Beach, Fla.Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Jared Moskowitz, a former emergency management chief in Florida, flew over Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island on Thursday to get a sense of Hurricane Ian’s damage, and compared what he saw to past catastrophic storms.

“It reminds me of Mexico Beach,” he said, referring to a town in the Florida Panhandle where Hurricane Michael came ashore in 2018 as a Category 5 storm, one of the strongest ever to hit the United States. “It reminds me of the New Jersey shore after Sandy.”

The barrier islands west of Fort Myers were devastated as Ian’s eye came ashore there on Wednesday afternoon as a Category 4, with 150 mile-per-hour winds, said Mr. Moskowitz, a former Democratic state representative from Broward County, in southeast Florida, who is now running for Congress.

“Fort Myers Beach and Sanibel Island look like they will need to be 80 percent rebuilt,” he estimated.

During the flyover, Mr. Moskowitz said, he saw air and sea rescues, though none of people who had been stranded on roofs. By Thursday morning, Ian’s crushing storm surge had receded.

“Houses had been wiped off their foundations,” he said. “Stuff was missing because it was swept out into the sea.”

He also saw flooded neighborhoods on the mainland, and waterlogged tracts of farmland farther inland. “It’s a once-a-generation event — though we’ve had two of them,” he said, referring to Hurricane Michael.

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Jacey Fortin
Sept. 29, 2022, 7:52 p.m. ET

Personal drones are interfering with rescue efforts, said Kevin Guthrie, Florida’s director of emergency management: “Please do not operate your drones in the areas where we have military aircraft, search or rescue aircraft working. When you go in there with your drone, they have to stop working.”

Jacey Fortin
Sept. 29, 2022, 7:40 p.m. ET

At a news conference, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said that the National Guard is assisting people in the state’s worst-hit areas. “There have been more than 700 confirmed rescues and there’s likely many more than that,” he said.

Eliza Fawcett
Sept. 29, 2022, 7:01 p.m. ET

At the Battery, Charleston’s historic defensive seawall, the streets were lined with antebellum houses and the occasional pile of sandbags on doorsteps. Lori Franz, 61, of Boston, was hoping the coming storm wouldn’t ruin the visit that she and her family had planned since 2020. “We figure, how bad can it be?" she said.

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Chevaz Clarke
Sept. 29, 2022, 6:54 p.m. ET

Video shows extensive damage to the Sanibel Island causeway, the only road that connects the island to mainland Florida. Boats were left stacked up at the Port Sanibel Marina.

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Traci Carl
Sept. 29, 2022, 6:48 p.m. ET

As Ian gathers strength over the ocean, the National Hurricane Center has issued a storm surge warning for the coasts of northeast Florida, Georgia and most of the Carolinas.

Winston Choi-Schagrin
Sept. 29, 2022, 6:48 p.m. ET

Downpours from Ian prompted Florida treatment plants to release waste.

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Reservoirs at Piney Point, a phosphate plant in Palmetto, Fla., that is in the process of being shut down.Credit...Drone Base, via Reuters

As of Thursday afternoon, excess water from Hurricane Ian had prompted at least a dozen wastewater treatment facilities in Florida to discharge either raw or partially treated waste, which can contain bacteria or other disease-causing organisms as well as high levels of nitrogen and phosphates, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.

Now, as the storm heads toward South Carolina, attention is turning to sites there that might be at risk.

Charleston, which is in the projected path of the storm, has a number of industrial facilities in low-lying areas that are adjacent to waterways, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center. Those sites include a plastic pellet operation, a paper mill, concrete and asphalt plants and scrap metal facilities.

South Carolina doesn’t require such facilities to submit storm water data or plans to the state, said Geoff Gisler, a senior attorney at the law center, so it is difficult to know how prepared they are. “We have no idea if they are meeting their requirements for normal storms,” he said. “When you get a major storm like this, we are very concerned the facilities won’t be ready.”

Scientists say storms like Ian are being made more powerful and more unpredictable by climate change.

Further inland, the state is home to hundreds of farms, including poultry operations and other types.

Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney at the law center, expressed concerns that high rainfall could cause poultry manure, which is often kept in uncovered pits, to run into waterways.

In 2018, floodwater and heavy rain from Hurricane Florence caused industrial sites in the Carolinas to overflow. More than a hundred manure lagoons flooded, releasing nutrient-rich pig waste, which can contribute to algal blooms, into the environment.

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A manatee from the polluted Indian River Lagoon in Florida at a rehabilitation center in Tampa last year. Credit...Eva Marie Uzcategui/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Although several wastewater treatment sites in Florida had reported discharging waste, it could be days, weeks, or even years before there’s a complete assessment of the harm, said Erik Olson, senior director for health and food at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Until people pull soil samples, you don’t know what the damage might be,” he said.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, there were more than 600 spills of hazardous materials, at locations including several Superfund sites and sewage treatment plants. Two years after Katrina, soil samples taken by the N.R.D.C. found elevated arsenic levels at playgrounds.

Another reason the extent of the damage may be difficult to immediately discern is because of the many smaller types of infrastructure, like home septic tanks, that are not monitored by the state.

And farms, golf courses and municipal parks sometimes use large amounts of fertilizer, which can enter rivers and streams, particularly after heavy rain and flooding.

The state doesn’t monitor runoff at those locations, said Catherine Kling, an environmental economist at Cornell University who has worked on water quality with the Environmental Protection Agency. “These are just everywhere, and a small leakage from a lot of them can add up to a lot of impact on the environment,” she said.

Phosphates and nitrogen, which are commonly found in high concentrations in fertilizers and sewage, represent the largest water quality problem in the United States.

Marine ecosystems in Florida have been particularly degraded by such runoff over the past few decades. Last year, more than a thousand manatees died in Florida, part of a record die-off that has been linked to pollution and algal blooms.

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A wastewater treatment site on the Waccamaw River in Conway, S.C., that was inundated by Hurricane Florence in 2018.Credit...Jason Lee/The Sun News, via Associated Press

Before the storm made landfall in Florida, environmental groups had expressed concerns about the open-air wastewater ponds associated with Florida’s phosphate mining operations. Florida produces most of the country’s phosphate, a key component of fertilizers, in a region east of Tampa called the Bone Valley.

The pools at those phosphate sites can hold hundreds of millions and, in some cases, billions of gallons of wastewater containing radon, uranium, radium and other carcinogens, said Ragan Whitlock, a staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Concerns centered on Piney Point, a phosphate plant that is in the process of being shut down, and a pond at Mosaic-New Wales, a phosphate manufacturing site. Representatives for both operations confirmed on Thursday that they had not detected any breaches.

The New York Times
Sept. 29, 2022, 6:17 p.m. ET

The Lee County Sheriff’s Office toured the region by air to survey the destruction caused by Hurricane Ian.

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Vimal Patel
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:57 p.m. ET

In Fort Myers Beach, a lively tourist town becomes a barren wasteland.

Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Fort Myers Beach, a laid-back coastal town on a barrier island, was among the areas hardest hit by Ian. Videos showed storm surge reaching nearly to the roofs of some one-story homes, with streets turned into rivers. The water slammed boats into houses, and the streets of the town were littered with trees and debris.

Officials on Thursday were assessing what they called widespread damage. “When you look at Fort Myers Beach in particular, there’s no words to describe it,” the Lee County sheriff, Carmine Marceno, said.

Patricia Mazzei
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:42 p.m. ET

Reporting from Fort Myers, Fla.

The areas hardest hit by hurricanes tend to have a particular smell of rot. Unfortunately, that is what the Matanzas Pass Bridge leading to Fort Myers Beach smells like right now. Both sides of it are lined with wrecked boats, debris and businesses crumpled like pieces of paper. And that’s not even at the beach yet.

Michael Majchrowicz
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:40 p.m. ET

In Arcadia, Fla., north of Fort Myers, water swallowed a significant swath of West Oak Street, on the east end of the bridge that spans Peace River. A DeSoto County Sheriff’s deputy implored a line of drivers not to attempt to cross. “It’s at your own risk,” he said to car after car. “We’re not going to tow you or be able to get you out if you’re stuck. Do you understand?” Behind him, a small four-door car stalled.

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Frances Robles
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:33 p.m. ET

When the canal out back rose up, they realized they had better flee, and quickly.

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Hurricane Ian swamped Naples, Fla., with storm surge.Credit...Giorgio Viera/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

NAPLES, Fla. — Dr. Chad Sulkes returned to the house he rents on Seagull Drive in Naples Park on Thursday to find it in complete disarray. All the furniture and other belongings were strewn about, covered in mud. Some items were in different rooms from where he had left them. The floor was slick with mud tainted with gasoline. He guessed the water that had flooded the house had risen at least chest high.

Dr. Sulkes, an eye doctor, and his girlfriend, Lisa Bessette, tried to dry out some of their clothes, and counted most everything else in the house as a complete loss, including the Audi in the garage and the boat sinking in the canal out back.

The couple were still in the 1960s-era house at 1 o’clock Wednesday afternoon as the storm bore down, but then Dr. Sulkes saw the canal breach the wall, and decided to pack a bag.

There was no place in the one-story house to escape the flood, so the choice he and Ms. Bessette faced at that point was a tough one: stay and battle the water, or leave and battle the wind, which was already up to 80 miles an hour. Dr. Sulkes said he envisioned himself wading through the storm waters with his cat Coco, and decided to flee in the midst of the storm instead.

He got the cat, but was there time to gather up childhood mementos and photographs? He grabbed the suitcases the couple had just packed, their keys, cellphones and wallets. But this was no time to get sentimental.

“I saw the water was about at the door of my truck, probably two-and-a-half feet deep,” he recalled Thursday afternoon as he cleaned his house. “It was just coming up at the front, and I said, ‘You know, if we don’t leave now, there’s no time. We’ll get flooded in.’ Every minute, you could see the water getting higher and higher.

“I always thought, ‘Oh, storm surge is just nothing, you have time.’ You don’t have time. You wait five minutes, you are under another six inches of water.”

Dr. Sulkes said the storm surge took him completely by surprise. He thought he had prepared well enough for the storm: He bought a generator, gas, food and a portable air-conditioner. Even so, “I don’t know that you can prepare for a 12-foot storm surge,” he said. “There’s no items you can buy to prepare for that. The only preparation is to leave.”

He considers himself fortunate because he has renters’ insurance and because he is building a new home not far away that came through the storm undamaged. “We are building up,” he said.

Nicole Craine
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:27 p.m. ET

In St. Augustine, a historic coastal city an hour south of Jacksonville, Ian's punishing winds pushed a storm surge over retaining walls that submerged streets and flooded the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument on Thursday.

Mitch Smith
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:26 p.m. ET

Ian, a hurricane once again, had sustained winds of 75 m.p.h. over the Atlantic on Thursday evening and was 240 miles south of Charleston, S.C. Forecasters said it could strengthen further before making landfall.

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Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

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Mitch Smith
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:25 p.m. ET

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said it was not yet clear how many people had remained on the barrier islands near Fort Myers and Cape Coral during the storm. He said several people had been rescued by air and that “rescue teams are working feverishly to get on the ground and conduct a full search.”

Ben Shpigel
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:24 p.m. ET

An Australian cameraman who saw a family struggling to wade through floodwaters on Wednesday in Naples, Fla., rushed to help — in the middle of a live broadcast. The cameraman, Glen Ellis, from the “Sunrise” program on Channel Seven in Australia, put down his equipment and ran past the correspondent, Tim Lester, to lug some of the family’s belongings above the water. For close to 90 seconds, the program aired live video shot from the abandoned camera on the ground.

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Matt Flegenheimer
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:19 p.m. ET

DeSantis, once a ‘no’ on Hurricane Sandy aid, petitions a president he has bashed.

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Homes were damaged and roads were flooded on Thursday in Port Charlotte, Fla., after Hurricane Ian hit the area.Credit...Johnny Milano for The New York Times

As a freshman congressman in 2013, Ron DeSantis was unambiguous: A federal bailout for the New York region after Hurricane Sandy was an irresponsible boondoggle, a symbol of the “put it on the credit card mentality” he had come to Washington to oppose.

“I sympathize with the victims,” he said. But his answer was no.

Nearly a decade later, as his state confronts the devastation and costly destruction wrought by Hurricane Ian, Mr. DeSantis is appealing to the nation’s better angels — and betting on its short memory.

“As you say, Tucker, we live in a very politicized time,” Mr. DeSantis, now Florida’s governor, told Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night, outlining his request for full federal reimbursement up front for 60 days and urging the Biden administration to do the right thing. “But you know, when people are fighting for their lives, when their whole livelihood is at stake, when they’ve lost everything — if you can’t put politics aside for that, then you’re just not going to be able to.”

The tonal whiplash for Mr. DeSantis reflects a different job and a different moment — a Tea Party-era House Republican now steering a perennially storm-battered state dependent once more on federal assistance to rebuild. Yet even in the context of his term as governor, the hurricane has required Mr. DeSantis to test another gear.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis discussing Hurricane Ian on Monday in Largo, Fla. Since taking office, he has sought to position himself as a 2024 presidential contender.Credit...Chris O'Meara/Associated Press

He has, to date, often used his executive platform to elevate himself to Republican rock-stardom, positioning himself as a possible 2024 presidential contender with a series of policy gambits that can feel precision-engineered to maximize liberal outrage.

His most recent stunt — flying undocumented Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard — reinforced that he is more than willing to turn the machinery of state against specific political targets. He has suggested that the next plane of immigrants might land near President Biden’s weekend home in Delaware.

The present circumstances have inspired a less swaggering posture toward a leader whom Mr. DeSantis has long called “Brandon” as a recurring troll, aimed at the man he might like to succeed. “Dear Mr. President,” the governor’s request for a major disaster declaration and federal assistance began on Wednesday.

“Ironically,” said David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, “there’s nobody in America that Ron DeSantis needs more than Joe Biden.”

More than that, Mr. Jolly said, a governor who self-identifies as unswerving in his principles now finds himself with little choice but to push for storm relief actions “antithetical to his professed ideology.”

“He held those convictions strong in the House,” said Mr. Jolly, who has been sharply critical of the party in the Trump years. “I doubt he will hold them as strongly in the governor’s mansion.”

In 2013, Mr. DeSantis and Representative Ted Yoho, another hard-line conservative, were the only House members from Florida to oppose the Sandy package. For Mr. DeSantis, who represented a coastal district in eastern Florida, the vote at once established him as an eager combatant from the party’s ascendant right wing — he was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus — while at times placing him on the defensive back home.

In a local interview that year, Mr. DeSantis said the bill contained “extraneous stuff” that could not be classified as emergency spending. “I never made the point of saying we shouldn’t do anything,” he said, adding that he could have supported a leaner package focused on immediate relief. Asked then if he would vote against a relief package that affected his own district, Mr. DeSantis was noncommittal, suggesting he would support a responsible plan.

Through the years, critics in both parties have accused Mr. DeSantis of applying this standard selectively. In 2017, as he was poised to run for governor, Mr. DeSantis supported an aid package after Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria as places like Florida, Texas and Puerto Rico strained to recover.

His 2018 primary opponent, Adam Putnam, made an issue of Mr. DeSantis’s voting record during the campaign. Storm-weary voters, a Putnam spokeswoman warned then, should protect themselves against “further destruction at the hands of Hurricane Ron.” Mr. DeSantis’s congressional office denied any inconsistency at the time, rejecting a comparison between the two disaster packages and saying he had supported emergency spending “when immediate and necessary.”

Asked about the governor’s past positions on Thursday, a DeSantis spokesman said the administration was “completely focused on hurricane response.” “As the governor said earlier,” the spokesman, Jeremy T. Redfern, said, “we have no time for politics or pettiness.”

Some Northeastern lawmakers, including Republicans, have not forgotten how Mr. DeSantis and some of his peers responded when the New York area was under duress. “Year after year, we had given them billions of dollars,” said Peter King, a former Republican congressman from Long Island, alluding to aid packages for Southern states and calling the resistance to Sandy relief his angriest moment in office. “Every one of them comes to New York to raise money. They either go to the Hamptons or they go to Manhattan. And both areas were devastated by Sandy.”

This week, Mr. DeSantis said he was “thankful” for the Biden administration’s efforts so far, moving to place himself in the tradition of above-the-fray leadership from past Florida governors who negotiated catastrophic weather events on their watch.

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President Biden on Thursday at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington. He has emphasized that he and Mr. DeSantis are working together.Credit...Kenny Holston for The New York Times

The president and the governor have each made a point of saying publicly that they and their teams are in touch. “He complimented me. He thanked me for the immediate response we had,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday, suggesting that any political conflicts with Mr. DeSantis were irrelevant in these times. “This is about saving people’s lives, homes and businesses.” (In February, Mr. DeSantis baselessly said Mr. Biden “stiffs” storm victims for political reasons, insisting that the president “hates Florida.”)

Haley Barbour, a Republican former governor of Mississippi who presided over the state’s response to Hurricane Katrina, said there was nothing inherently inconsistent about a conservative governor seeking federal storm money. “People think this is a role for the federal government — that some disasters are too big for the community to bear the cost to get back to where you need to be,” he said.

Besides, he suggested, Mr. DeSantis and the White House suddenly had something in common. “Biden likes to say, ‘Build back better,’” Mr. Barbour said. “Well, that’s what Florida wants to do.”

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Lora Kelley
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:15 p.m. ET

The scale of financial loss from Hurricane Ian is only beginning to emerge. An initial analysis from Fitch Ratings on Thursday found that losses covered by insurance alone could range from $25 billion to $40 billion for Florida.

Sept. 29, 2022, 5:08 p.m. ET

Ian causes flooding and damage across Florida.

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Rescue workers in Orlando, Fla., on Thursday. Epic rain and high winds pounded much of central Florida the day after Hurricane Ian made landfall. Credit...Phelan M. Ebenhack/EBENP, via Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla. — The emergency call came from the nursing home shortly after 5 a.m.: Water was seeping into the low-slung, low-lying complex called Avante at Orlando and threatening its 106 residents, some of them too frail to walk.

By daybreak, dozens of rescue workers had descended on Avante, which bills itself as a skilled nursing and rehabilitation center. The water in the building was about a foot deep, but it was perhaps as high as three feet in the parking lot outside. Many of the patients, in their 80s or 90s, were wheeled out on cots, their white sheets billowing in the whipping winds trailing Hurricane Ian, their faces filled with fear and confusion.

Soon, however, they were safe — if shaken and wet — in vans and buses bound for shelters and hospitals.

As epic rain and high wind pounded much of central Florida on Thursday, a picture emerged of what the storm had wrought, from wrenching catastrophe to mere gale-force inconvenience. The battered landscape ranged from utter devastation on the southwestern coast to wearily familiar flooding in St. Augustine near the state’s northeastern edge.

Rescue teams worked feverishly to retrieve people from the barrier islands near Cape Coral, and wrecked boats and drifts of rotting debris piled up along the eviscerated beach in Fort Myers. In Arcadia, Fla., about an hour to the north, the quaint historic district was a ravaged display of broken glass and blown-out storefronts. Water had swallowed a swath of West Oak Street, on the east end of the bridge that spans Peace River, and a DeSoto County Sheriff’s deputy implored a line of drivers not to attempt to cross on Thursday.

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Parts of Orlando received as much as 14 inches of rain. Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times

“It’s at your own risk,” he said to car after car. “We’re not going to tow you or be able to get you out if you’re stuck. Do you understand?” Behind him, a small four-door car stalled.

Elsewhere, however, many inland survivors viewed the storm as a worst-case scenario averted.

“It’s a cliché, but we got lucky,” Paul Womble, the director of emergency management in Polk County in central Florida, said, noting that anticipated tornadoes had failed to materialize and that no injuries had been reported. Due east of Tampa Bay, the county had first braced for complete disaster, with the hurricane seemingly headed straight for it, and then for two feet of rain as the storm shifted south, as well as a massive surge in the already swollen Peace River.

But the hurricane had spent a good deal of its force by the time it hit the southern end of the county, and the damage, Mr. Womble said, was limited mostly to power outages and a carpet of debris, branches and snapped power poles. Cleanup would be substantial, he said, but Hurricane Irma in 2017 probably would turn out to have been more destructive.

In the small town of Bartow, Pete Miranda, a Polk County resident for half a century, was relieved but still shaken.

“Dude, it was bad,” said Mr. Miranda, who was raking up branches near his home at a battered-but-still-standing mobile home park. A former oil driller, he said he had stayed behind to watch for looters but the storm was far more violent than he had expected.

“It was whistling at me like it was a woman,” he said. “But don’t get me wrong — it was scary.”

Where Ian passed as a still powerful but somewhat diminished Category 3 storm, the landscape just inland from the Gulf Coast looked rattled but not ruined.

Giant oaks lay broken next to highways covered in thick carpets of leaves and Spanish moss, cow pastures were now small lakes, and the aluminum roof of one gas station plaza was slam-dunked into the ground.

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Boys using skim boards on one flooded street in Orlando. Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Power crews were everywhere, and so was the work cut out for them, with utility poles snapped and dangling on their own sagging power lines. In towns and even small cities, traffic lights were mostly dark, and the cars and trucks waited hesitantly at each intersection. Gas stations were mostly out of service.

North of the storm’s track, while people were busy clearing huge mats of debris from roofs and porches, the homes themselves were mostly still standing. The low-lying areas of some towns — places that local officials said had routinely flooded in Charley and Irma and even some recent bad storms — had flooded again but not as severely as they had at times in the past.

But the closer one got to Fort Myers, the reports of damage became more dire. Large parts of Hardee County, a rural area that was devastated by Charley in 2004, were flooded on Thursday, and the sheriff’s department said in a Facebook post that the waters were still rising. “Search and rescue missions are still underway,” the post said. “It will be dark soon.”

In Orlando, the heart of the state’s tourist industry, the mayor of surrounding Orange County said about only half of the two feet of predicted rain had fallen, and Disney World said its theme parks would resume operation on Friday in a phased reopening.

Still, the Orlando neighborhood of Rio Pinar Estates had become a giant, impassible lake as the mayor briefed the public, and some 200,000 residents were without electricity. The houses, many of them broad, one-story ranches, had not gone under, although many had taken on water: In the street, it appeared to be three feet deep or more in places. Rescue crews had taken out some residents in boats.

At around 11 a.m., Ava King, who lives in the last house before the water started, was yelling at the driver of a pickup truck that was nosing into the water. “I wouldn’t do it,” she hollered.

The truck was in up to its headlights. It slowly backed up.

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Rescue workers evacuating residents from Avante at Orlando, a skilled nursing and rehabilitation center. Credit...John Raoux/Associated Press

Inside her house, the power was out, and towels were all over the floor. A little water had seeped in, and a creek that runs behind the house was engorged and took up the entire backyard. Ms. King’s neighbor, Jessica Murphy, 39, was sprawled out on a sofa. She lived two doors down. She said she had to swim to Ms. King’s house.

“About midnight, I noticed that there was water coming in. By 3 a.m. it was to my knees,” Ms. Murphy said. She was alone; her three children were with her ex-husband. And she was worried about water in her power outlets. She struggled to figure out how to cut off the electricity. “I didn’t know if it was safest to stay or safest to go,” she said. She called Ms. King and said she was coming over.

“I tried to get out my front door. It wouldn’t open because there was so much water on the other side,” she said. “So I had to go out the boys’ room window in the front of the house.”

She didn’t know how long it would take to fix up her place and make it livable again. For now, she said, she was going to live with her father.

“He’s dry,” she said of his house. “He’s bone dry.”

Rick Rojas and Michael Majchrowicz contributed reporting.

Amy Qin
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:08 p.m. ET

‘Nothing was spared’ in one county along Florida’s Atlantic coast.

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A utility worker in a flooded road in Port Orange, a city in Volusia County, Fla., on Thursday.Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In Volusia County, northeast of Orlando on Florida’s Atlantic coast, residents weren’t expecting Hurricane Ian to hit them so hard.

Sheriff Michael Chitwood said he and other locals were reassured by early projections that the storm would take a more northerly course. Instead, it cut across the peninsula from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean.

“Nobody expected what we got,” he said. “And nothing was spared.”

Two deaths have been reported so far, Mr. Chitwood said: a 74-year-old man who slid into a creek as he tried to drain his pool and a 70-year-old woman who had been on a catwalk near the ocean when it collapsed.

“I’m sure there are people in homes we haven’t gotten to yet,” he said.

Mr. Chitwood said his office received nearly 200 panicked calls for help overnight, and rescuers waded into waist-deep waters on Thursday to help stranded residents evacuate from flooded homes. That included a 97-year-old woman who had fallen out of her bed and broke her hip.

Another 97-year-old woman refused to evacuate unless her horses could be saved too, Mr. Chitwood said. The rescuers had no choice but to leave her there, sitting in the flooded stalls.

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Mitch Smith
Sept. 29, 2022, 5:02 p.m. ET

Ian gained strength as it moved over the Atlantic during the afternoon, returning to hurricane status. It is poised to hit South Carolina on Friday.

Campbell Robertson
Sept. 29, 2022, 4:40 p.m. ET

Reporting from Central Florida

“Dude it was bad,” said Pete Miranda, who was raking up branches at a battered but still standing mobile home park in Bartow, Fla., a little town 40 miles east of Tampa where he has lived for some 50 years. He stayed behind to watch out for looters, he said, but the storm lasted much longer than he was prepared for. “It was whistling at me like it was a woman,” he said. “But don’t get me wrong, it was scary.“

Rick Rojas
Sept. 29, 2022, 4:39 p.m. ET

On Florida’s eastern coast, floodwaters sweep into St. Augustine from a powerful storm surge.

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The A1A coastal byway in St. Augustine, Fla., on Thursday.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Communities along the northeastern coast of Florida avoided a direct assault from Tropical Storm Ian, which forecasts had indicated as a possibility. Even so, the region was not spared, as a powerful storm surge swamped streets and residents were trapped by floodwaters.

In Jacksonville — Florida’s most populous city, with more than 900,000 people — officials called for continued vigilance as powerful winds whipped through the city and the heavy rain threatened floods. “The risk still exists,” Lenny Curry, the mayor, said during a briefing on Thursday.

In St. Augustine, one of the oldest cities in the United States, some stretches looked as though they had been annexed by the bay. The churning waters slammed boats into docks, swamped vehicles and pushed into neighborhoods of narrow roads and centuries-old homes and businesses.

“There’s a lot of flooding in downtown St. Augustine,” said Jeffrey A. Prevatt, the chief of St. Johns County Fire Rescue. “If you’ve lived here, if you were born and raised here, you know St. Augustine is prone to that.”

Even with that familiarity with flooding, the storm surge on Thursday stirred painful memories of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Matthew as it inundated the downtown in 2016, and then by Hurricane Irma, which brought even more damage in 2017. Chief Prevatt said the extent of the flooding on Thursday appeared comparable to that from Hurricane Matthew.

The surge was high enough that officials had to close the Bridge of Lions, which runs over the bay and connects to major peninsulas in the city. But officials said the impacts of the storm were rippling out beyond downtown, with destruction caused by winds that were close to 50 miles per hour.

In some places, the flooding stranded residents in their homes. Officials said that by Thursday afternoon there had been well over 300 calls asking for help, and high-water vehicles had to be deployed. “We have a lot of work to do,” Chief Prevatt said.

It appeared that the storm surge had reached its highest levels by Thursday afternoon, but officials implored residents to stay put.

“Please, be patient,” Hunter S. Conrad, the St. Johns County administrator, told residents during a briefing on Thursday. “Please continue to wait. We’ll continue to feel the effects of this storm all the way through the night.”

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Michael Majchrowicz
Sept. 29, 2022, 4:26 p.m. ET

Kristen Constantino and Danny Mastrodonato spent the past year refurbishing their 120-seat performance venue, the Heard Opera House, in downtown Arcadia, about 35 miles from the coast. They hosted their first — and so far only — live show last week. “The paint was barely dry,” Constantino said.

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Credit...Michael Majchrowicz for The New York Times
Niraj ChokshiLora Kelley
Sept. 29, 2022, 4:22 p.m. ET

Companies announce temporary closures for the storm.

Companies in the Southeastern United States announced plans to temporarily close while some in Florida prepared to reopen as Tropical Storm Ian strengthened back into a hurricane on its way up the coast.

Boeing and Mercedes-Benz said on Thursday that they were closing factories in South Carolina, as the storm was expected to make landfall there overnight.

Boeing said that its facilities would remain open until midnight on Thursday, but instructed employees with night shifts not to come in. The company employs about 5,500 people in South Carolina, where it mainly completes the assembly of its 787 Dreamliner, a twin-aisle plane typically used for international flights. Boeing said that it expected to restart normal operations on Sunday, though a small crew of workers may be called back on Saturday.

“The safety and well-being of our teammates is our top priority,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue to assess the storm’s impact to employees and our operations.”

Mercedes-Benz said that it would close a facility near Charleston, S.C., on Friday, where it employs about 1,600 people and produces the Sprinter and Metris commercial vans.

UPS and FedEx warned customers in Florida that packages would not be delivered or picked up in parts of the state, or that service could be delayed. The United States Postal Service said it had closed about 100 facilities in Florida until further notice.

But as the hurricane began to move up the coast, some parts of Florida’s economy were positioned to reopen.

Orlando International Airport, Florida’s second largest, said Thursday that all roads leading into the facility had flooded, but that it expected to restart flights on Friday, pending a damage assessment. Tampa International Airport, the state’s fourth largest, said it had sustained no serious damage from the storm and would restart commercial flights at 10 a.m. on Friday.

Other industries were also affected by the storm.

  • Theme parks: Legoland Florida Resort said its theme parks and water park would be closed on Friday for damage assessment and cleanup. Walt Disney World said it would begin a phased reopening of its theme park and Disney Springs complex on Friday.

  • Retailers: Walmart had closed about 250 stores as of Thursday afternoon, mostly in Florida. Home Depot said that it had closed or adjusted the operating hours of about 100 stores in the state.

  • Grocers: Winn Dixie said it had closed 225 stores and 130 pharmacies throughout Florida. Publix said it had ordered rolling store closures since Monday.

  • Dining: Waffle House said that two dozen Florida restaurants were closed from Naples to Tampa, though it expected some to reopen as early as Thursday night. DoorDash said that it had suspended operations across more than a dozen major cities in Florida and that it also planned to suspend operations in parts of Georgia and South Carolina starting on Thursday night.

Mitch Smith
Sept. 29, 2022, 4:12 p.m. ET

Lee Health, a health care system in southwest Florida, said it had decided to evacuate its patients because of problems with water supply and power.

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Brooks Barnes
Sept. 29, 2022, 4:09 p.m. ET

Universal Studios Florida has yet to say when it might reopen; it is located in an area of Orlando with significant flooding and photos posted online indicate wind damage to its “Jurassic Park” ride.

Brooks Barnes
Sept. 29, 2022, 4:09 p.m. ET

Disney World said it would begin reopening its theme parks and Disney Springs shopping district on Friday with a “phased approach.” A Disney official said the parks appeared to have minimal structural damage, but full safety inspections were expected to stretch into the weekend.

Mitch Smith
Sept. 29, 2022, 3:57 p.m. ET

Joe Coates, the emergency management director in Charleston County, S.C., encouraged residents of barrier islands and low-lying areas to evacuate ahead of Ian’s expected landfall on Friday.

Patricia Mazzei
Sept. 29, 2022, 3:50 p.m. ET

Reporting from Fort Myers, Fla.

In Fort Myers, a mayor finds a line for pizza amid miles of destruction.

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The Fort Myers Wharf on Thursday. Fort Myers was among the cities hardest hit by Hurricane Ian. Credit...Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, via Associated Press

Mayor Kevin B. Anderson of Fort Myers watched helplessly from his condo on Wednesday as Hurricane Ian pushed ashore and water from the Caloosahatchee River rose through his city’s downtown.

“The globes of the light posts were popping,” he said. “I saw windows blow out. Planters fly off.”

He lost electricity and water service. The power returned. The water has not. He forgot to fill his bathtub ahead of the storm, as experts recommend. “I’m wishing I had!” he said.

Most of his neighbors in Lee County were also without running water.

On Thursday, when he ventured downtown, he saw businesses that had lost their front windows and been flooded. One pizza place, he said, stayed up all night cleaning and, by lunchtime, had a line out the door of people willing to wait an hour for a hot pie.

Telecommunications have been so spotty that Mr. Anderson has been unable to reach the city’s fire chief to find out how many residents required rescuing. A hospital was without power and water and had to transfer some patients to another hospital in Naples, he said.

Ian hit at high tide, which made the storm surge worse. Mr. Anderson, a resident since the mid-1970s, said he had never experienced such a strong storm.

“But Floridians are resilient,” he said. “They’re strong. They have come back from storms before.”

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Mitch Smith
Sept. 29, 2022, 3:33 p.m. ET

Tampa International Airport will reopen for commercial flights on Friday morning. The airport sustained no major damage from the hurricane.

Christine Chung
Sept. 29, 2022, 3:15 p.m. ET

The popular fishing pier in the city of Naples, Fla., sustained “extensive damage” but escaped being entirely demolished, Jay Boodheshwar, the city manager, said in an afternoon news conference.

Eden Weingart
Sept. 29, 2022, 3:12 p.m. ET

How Hurricane Ian compares to Charley, another southwest Florida storm.

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Satellite imagery showed the differences in size between Hurricane Charley in 2004, left, and Hurricane Ian, right, on Wednesday afternoon.Credit...National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

As Hurricane Ian churned into Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, it evoked a 2004 hurricane, Charley, that struck the area. Both were Category 4 storms that hit near Cayo Costa with wind speeds of around 150 miles per hour, and both severely damaged suburban areas around Fort Myers.

But that’s where the similarities end. Satellite imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals the difference in scale of these two storms. Ian was nearly double the size of Charley at landfall, when the eye of the hurricane moves ashore. Satellite images taken Wednesday afternoon show Ian obscuring nearly the entire state.

According to the National Weather Service in Key West, Fla., Ian had hurricane-force winds spanning 90 miles, and tropical-storm-force winds spanning 350 miles. Charley’s hurricane-force winds extended 50 miles, with 170 miles of tropical-storm-force winds.

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Gulf Drive on Captiva Island was once famous for its shade trees, but most of them were toppled by Hurricane Charley in August 2004.Credit...William S. Speer for The New York Times
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James Grey looking for his house boat on Thursday along the Caloosahatchee River in downtown Fort Myers, Fla.Credit...Kinfay Moroti for The New York Times

Another key difference is the speed at which the storms moved across the state. Charley inflicted most of its damage by wind as it sliced across Florida at 15 m.p.h. The much larger Ian, however, lingered on the coast, moving at just nine m.p.h.

“Ian is very slow-moving, almost a crawl,” Chris Rothwell, lead meteorologist at the Weather Service in Key West, said. “It’s a much larger storm, and larger storms produce a lot more surge.”

Charley produced a maximum surge of six to seven feet, on Sanibel and Estero Islands, while Ian is estimated to have caused surges up to 12 feet.

Despite its more modest size, Charley caused significant damage, resulting in 10 U.S. fatalities and an estimated $15 billion in losses. For now, officials are still assessing the damage from Ian, but warned that the flooding it was causing could set records. The storm, they said, could go down as one of the worst ever to hit Florida.

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