Most of the deaths from the storm have been in Lee County which did not get a serious Hurricane warning until 36-48 hours before the storm….
By Wednesday morning, with just hours before the storm was set to make landfall, the governor was warning people to shelter in place, saying “it’s no longer possible to safely evacuate [in some areas]. It’s time to hunker down and prepare for this storm.”
Kevin Guthrie, director Florida’s Division of Emergency Management, said the storm’s path was very difficult to predict and state officials make decisions with the best information they have at the time.
“Lee county did not get real notice that they were going to be the center of this thing until about 36-48 hours,” he said during a briefing on Friday.
DeSantis, at that same briefing, also said local officials had acted appropriately given the data they had.
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Several other counties in southwest Florida and west-central Florida — including Charlotte County, immediately to the north of Lee — had issued mandatory evacuation orders for their barrier islands on Monday, offering crucial extra time for people to depart a low-lying region with few major escape routes. The National Hurricane Center warned Monday that the region from Fort Myers to Tampa Bay faced the highest risk of storm surge, regardless of Ian’s exact path.
Even so, DeSantis pointed to the ample public warnings early this week that Ian posed a catastrophic danger to the flood-prone Tampa Bay region, which had not taken a direct hit from a major hurricane in more than a century.
“When we went to bed Monday night, people were saying this is a direct hit on Tampa Bay — worst case scenario for the state,” DeSantis said during a news briefing in Fort Myers on Saturday.
The Republican governor’s defense is part of what could become a long debate about the region’s warnings and preparations for Ian, one of the most destructive hurricanes ever to hit the United States.
The storm struck 18 years after another Category 4 hurricane, Charley, similarly crashed ashore in southwest Florida after being forecast to hit Tampa Bay. That incident prompted meteorologists and emergency managers to warn against focusing too obsessively on the “skinny black line” of a hurricane forecast track, urging people to pay more attention to the wider swath of expected winds and surge….