FORT MYERS BEACH, Fla. — The water was rising fast, so the women ran to the top floor of the vacation home they had rented for Nishelle Harris-Miles’ 40th birthday and huddled together on a bed.
But Hurricane Ian’s storm surge gushed across the floor, lifting the mattress higher and higher until all four crashed into the ceiling. Then the roof collapsed, driving a nail through the neck of the woman they affectionately called Nene.
“Nene died right there with us,” Chanel Maston, 48, said through tears as she recounted the ordeal. “She took her last breaths with us.”
As death tolls emerged from the destruction in southwest Florida, President Biden, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and local authorities have clashed over Ian’s death toll. Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno told “Good Morning America” that the death toll could be in the hundreds. Biden warned that Ian could be “the deadliest hurricane in Florida history.” The governor has played down the death toll in daily briefings, saying the tropical cyclone’s toll will not approach the 1928 hurricane that killed a record 2,500.
However, Ian is already shaping up to be the deadliest storm to hit Florida since 1935. State authorities have documented 89 deaths so far, a number that is slightly higher than the death toll from Hurricane Irma in 2017, according to the National Hurricane Center. County sheriffs have reported dozens more, bringing the total to at least 117. This makes Ian deadlier than Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Ian’s storm surge has claimed the most lives, according to the Florida Commission of Medical Examiners, which tallies direct and indirect deaths. Sixty percent of the nearly 90 victims for whom a cause of death was provided drowned, underscoring what experts call an often-overlooked reality: Water typically kills more people than wind.
Storm surge of up to 18 feet blasted through homes, trapping some people indoors while sweeping others into brown rivers. A woman was found tangled under the house with cables. Many of those who drowned were elderly.
“I don’t want to scare people, but they need to understand: The number one cause of death will be drowning,” said W. Craig Fugate, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Division of Disaster Management Florida Emergencies. “Storm surge doesn’t sound inherently deadly unless you get it.”
A week after making landfall, rescue teams continue to wade through shattered communities, often with only a vague idea of who might be buried in the rubble. Lee County Manager Roger Desjarlais admitted at a news conference Monday that officials don’t know how many people they’re looking for. First responders rely on cadaver dogs.
“We don’t have anything,” Virginia Task Force 2 leader Brian Sullivan said Tuesday as his team searched Red Coconut RV Park in Fort Myers Beach, ground zero of the storm. “The sheriff’s office was trying to work to compile a missing persons list. We have not received any information in this area.”
Counting the dead is an inexact science—for example, there is no sure number for Hurricane Katrina—and over the years, officials have debated what qualifies as a storm death. Hurricane Maria’s toll was initially in the dozens, with officials only including drownings and blunt force trauma. But an analysis of the excess deaths later pushed the total into the thousands. Many elderly people died in Puerto Rico as the blackout on the island continued for months and medical care was hard to come by.
DeSantis indicated at first that indirect deaths may not have been counted.
“For example, in Charlotte County, they recorded one suicide during the storm,” he said the day after the storm. “They also had someone die of a heart attack because you don’t have access to emergency services.”
But the agency charged with cataloging the deaths, the Florida Medical Examiners Commission, adheres to a broader definition.
“We include motor vehicle accidents if someone is trying to evacuate and is flown in,” spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said. “If someone had a heart attack when medical services were going down. … If there was any suspicion that it was related to a hurricane, that’s a storm death.”
According to the National Hurricane Center, water—storm surge, rain, inland flooding, and surf—directly causes 90 percent of tropical cyclone deaths in the United States. The main indirect killers: car accidents, carbon monoxide poisoning, electrocution and heat. And the deadly danger persists after the skies have cleared, said Jay Barnes, a hurricane historian in North Carolina.
“Deaths often occur during cleanup,” he said. “Everything from carbon monoxide poisoning and chainsaw victims to people falling off roofs.”
Many Americans underestimate the power of hurricane force winds, disaster experts say. They tend to imagine powerful gusts and downed trees, perhaps because the country’s best-known rating scale measures wind. Some at risk choose to stay home. Critics have slammed Lee County authorities for not ordering Fort Myers Beach residents to evacuate more quickly.
“There’s a saying in the industry that you run from the water and hide from the wind,” said John Renne, director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Solutions at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. “We need to do a much better job of conveying risk to storm areas.”
Fort Myers Beach resident Mitch Pacyna, 74, had weathered 27 years of tropical storms. His social life was so full that Pacyna’s friends jokingly referred to him as “the mayor”.
On Facebook, he documented the storm’s approach, noting that the forecast had suggested Ian would veer toward Tampa. When county officials ordered her barrier island to be evacuated before the hurricane hit, Pacyna chose to stay behind.
“Oh my God…wrong decision,” he lamented in a video as water swept across his street. Soon, the tide crashed into the house he shared with his partner, Mary, and washed away the bar he had built in his garage.
Pacyna’s latest post: “ESTEM TORRIS”.
His family announced his death the following day.
“Everybody loved her,” said Scott Safford, co-owner of the Sea Gypsy Inn, a lemon-yellow hotel that once stood near Pacyna’s home. It doesn’t exist now.
For rescue teams, the search for victims is hampered by a lack of information about who was left behind and where the waves might have taken them.
The Red Coconut RV Park, once a beachfront oasis, was crushed into pieces of roof, walls and objects. Dozens of members of Virginia Task Force 2, one of the urban search and rescue teams deployed to Florida, dug through the rubble Tuesday as three cadaver dogs detected a possible human scent. They found only household items, including an errant cooler full of beer.
“It’s just total destruction,” said Sullivan, the team leader.
Little was left of the vacation home that friends and family of Nishelle Harris-Miles had booked for her birthday.
The women from Dayton, Ohio, had heard that Ian was headed for Tampa Bay and figured the airline or charter owner would cancel them if the storm posed a real threat to Fort Myers Beach.
They had arrived on the Tuesday before Ian hit and tried to make the most of it: dancing inside, taking silly pictures, singing “Happy Birthday”.
“We were crushed against the roof,” Maston said of what came next. “We were fighting the roof, and there was water everywhere. The next thing you know, the roof fell in and we went with it.”
They were stuck in the rubble for 14 hours, he estimated. Eventually, someone heard their screams, built a makeshift plank, and pulled them out. A rescuer who descended from a helicopter confirmed what Maston already knew: Nene was dead.
“We didn’t want to leave her behind,” he said.
Nene was the mother of two sons and two daughters. A home health aide who cared about her patients. A tourist who had saved up for that trip.
“We could never have imagined it,” Maston said. “I saw bodies hanging from the windows. I’ve never seen anything like that, only on TV.”
“We didn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t know.”
Lenny Bernstein contributed to this report. Paquette reported from Washington.