at 19, a number that is almost certain to rise in the days ahead. the u.s. president warming up thursday poll of a lot of loss of life as one official sank likely the biggest natural disaster disaster the state s ever seen. that s the biggest disaster in florida s history. tens of thousands of emergency workers and deployed statewide. now 2 million homes and businesses stay with the electricity. large parts of the state are underwater. instead it s a one in 1000-year rainfall. the governor ron desantis decided describe the storm surge is biblical. some of the damage was almost under scribe-able to see a house just sitting in the middle of a sterile bay. you must be flown because of the massive wind speed and storm surge and deposited in a body of water. there were cars floating in the middle of the water. some of the homes were total losses. he is expected to hit south carolina and coincide with high tide on friday, greatly to increasing the potential for flooding. the go
coming into at 150 miles per hour, producing this type of storm surge, dumping weighing, rain, causing flooding, and if he can make it through that, you probably did it pretty good. so this is a 24/7 effort, to stabilize, and to restore. and ian swamped across the port charlotte for about above and below, forcing hospital employees to move patients. very, very quickly, we got people out of the icu. the problem then ended up being that the water flush down the stairwell that as we see here. and on to other floors. we saw scenes of flooding all over central florida. residents say they never seen the water rise so fast. the rain was unrelenting for hours and people are just hoping to dry out sometime soon. reporting in orlando, florida, ryan young, cnn. let s get the latest now, meteorologist karen mcguinness, very important to find out where exactly in it, so we know that this has been a changing event all evening.