A man from Naples, Florida, a city in the area where Hurricane Ian hit last week, he swam to the home of his 84-year-old mother, who cannot walk and uses a wheelchair, and found her chest-deep in water.
John Lauder told the WTSP channel that after putting his children safely in the attic of his house, came out on board a surfboard to the flooded street and swam to his mother’s home, located a few meters from his. When she entered the house there was more than a meter of water, product of the storm surge that Ian caused, and his mother was up to her chest.
Lauder explained that managed to save the woman on a table wrapped in blankets and decided to wait for the water to subside to leave the house in search of a safe place. “It took us almost an hour to get to a hotel on the corner to find a dry spot,” said the man, whose home and his mother’s were destroyed by the hurricane.
“We’re fine. A house lost and material possessions lost, but we did not lose lives“He said. The woman, who suffers from a skin condition, is recovering in a Naples hospital, where she is being treated for an infection as a result of the cyclone.
Ian made landfall on Key Coast in southwestern Florida last Wednesday with maximum sustained winds of 240 km/h, that is, as a category four hurricane, out of a maximum of five on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Two days later, it made landfall again in South Carolina, as a category one hurricane. Before, he had done it in western Cuba.
In Florida, as announced on Monday by its governor, Ron DeSantis, it has been achieved so far restore electricity to 95% of users that they lost it, although in the southwest of this state, ground zero, the process of restoring power will take longer.
Although DeSantis and Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said it is still Difficult to give a definitive death toll, the Florida Medical Examiners Commission reported 68 confirmed deaths for Ian. The figure differs from the accounting given by the American media, many of which speak of more than a hundred.