![]() ![]() 1 killer in hurricanes for years, accounting for 90% of direct deaths in storms for the last sixty years, according to the NHC. It’s not expected to return to its normal level of around 12 feet for over a week. The overflowing river invaded people’s homes, leading to high water rescues by police days after Ian made landfall. The Peace River in Arcadia surged 10 feet higher in two days, soaring past the 20-foot record and is expect to reach nearly 24 feet high over the weekend. “Depending on the timing, the double punch can be fatal.” “These are two colliding forces that compound the effects of each other,” Valle-Levinson said. The area saw five feet of storm surge, but after the winds died down, the river rose even higher, he said. He pointed to 2017’s Hurricane Irma, where the greatest flooding in places like Jacksonville happened after the center of the storm passed by and the winds had subsided. That rain-driven flooding after storm surge can often be the second round of a storm’s one-two punch, said Arnoldo Valle-Levinson, a researcher with the University of Florida’s civil and coastal engineering department. “It really obliterated the 1 in 1000-year criteria,” he said.īerardelli said that although Florida soils are usually absorbent and can handle more rain than many other spots in the nation, central Florida had seen two to three times the normal month’s amount of rain recently and its soil was too soggy to hold much more. That ranks this rain event as something with a less than 0.1% chance of happening in a given year. The Sarasota area saw more than 13 inches of rain in only six hours, Berardelli said. One spot in New Smyrna counted nearly 30 inches of rainfall. Initial estimates suggest as much as 19 inches in spots like Fort Myers, Sebring and Daytona Beach, very close to the maximum of 24 inches predicted by the hurricane center. The slow-moving storm crawled up the I-4 corridor dumping tremendous amounts of rain and flooding central Florida so badly that dozens of people had to be rescued from their homes by boat. ![]() “I wouldn’t be surprised if we got to 12 feet,” Berardelli said.īut for most of the state, the impact they felt from Hurricane Ian was not surge, it was rain. It will take time before scientists can carefully measure the high water marks now staining homes, hospitals and businesses across Southwest Florida and analyze the true numbers. It’s hard to say how close the hurricane center’s prediction was, because the storm surge broke some of the tide gauges in the area, but not before they registered at least seven feet of surge. That’s the power of water.”ĭays before Ian made landfall, the National Hurricane Center was issuing dire warnings about the historic surge, with an extreme of 18 feet of surge expected in Charlotte Harbor. “People look at the images and say ‘that was wind.’ No, it was storm surge. “This was probably the largest area of storm surge damage that we’ve seen in recent history,” he said. “It’s going to go down in the history books.”Ĭraig Fugate, former head of FEMA and director of Florida’s emergency management division, said on WLRN on Friday that Hurricane Ian’s surge was some of the worst he’d ever seen. “Storm surge is gonna be what this storm is remembered for,” said Jeff Berardelli, a meteorologist and climate specialist with WFLA in Tampa Bay. Ron DeSantis called it a flood of “biblical” proportions, and President Joe Biden warned it could prove one of Florida’s deadliest hurricanes. “So I stuffed my cats in my carry-on suitcase, grabbed my sister’s ashes and jumped out the living room window.”Īfter dodging floating projectiles like fences and mailboxes, he found salvation in a neighbor’s home on stilts at the end of the street. It was rising so fast I knew it was only a matter of minutes before I was underwater,” he said. “A mini-tsunami hit and the water came up to my front doorknob. ![]()
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