hurricane ian regained strength, now once again a hurricane barreling towards south carolina as a category 1 storm with 85 mile an hour winds expected to make its third landfall just a few hours from now. the governor of south carolina after seeing the catastrophic damage in florida imploring residents in his state not to underestimate this storm. warning, we know what is coming. officials in florida say ian is likely the largest natural disaster in the history of that state, prompting the largest emergency response ever in florida. and the toll is coming in. at least 19 people killed so far, that number sadly likely to rise. more than 2 million people in the state it s a huge number remain without power. in fort myers beach the damage described by officials there is total devastation. look at those pictures, it s like a tornado just swept through there. 90% of that island destroyed, most of the homes there completely flattened. it just is destroyed and it s ruined an
have done a great job standing up for the people of their community. i will let kevin give a brief on the state response and then we will have the fema administrator come up and provide some perspective from fema. thank you, governor. so obviously thank you to the governor, but i want to thank the agencies represented here to my left, especially gracia fema administrator dan criswell, captain rooney, others that are not here that are certainly on that floor behind me. lieutenant colonel miller from the u.s. army corps out of jacksonville, and many other federal partners that have helped us here. captain, if you can just grab that easel and put it back up here for a second. i wanted to thank them before i covered them up with a sign here in just a second. all right. let s talk we re right in that 72-hour area of search,
petronus. you have flood claims as a result of this. you will have some wind claims as a result of this and it s our view that these claims need to be paid very quickly so that people can get back on their feet. i want to thank the first lady for spear heading her efforts for volunteer florida and activate the florida disaster fund where people can donate. if you want to contribute, you will be joining a lot of people who have done a lot of money and we now have over $12 million with, you know, 24 to 36 hours after the storm hits pretty incredible that that s happened. if you want to do, go to floridadisasterfund.org. more than 12 million has come in and there s a lot of interest to do a lot more. why is that important? fema has certain things they can do via statute regulation, but if it falls outside of that they just can t do it. that s not the way it works. and so when you enlist private
there will be some that will require rebuilds. so the u opportunities, f p&l was down there first thing, they understand that and they are prepared to do that. the other issue with lee county they ve asked support from is they had a water main break for their county water utility. that means that the county does not have water at this point and you need that to be able to function in society. they ve requested support from fema and then we fema was able to provide the army corps of engineers and they were on the ground after kevin called them, i think, at like 3:00 in the morning yesterday, they were on the ground from jacksonville all the way down to southwest florida in the afternoon. they ve been working to assessing that situation. we also have florida national guard personnel standing by to help the army corps if they need it, but at the end of the day, you know, that is something that will be very, very critical to be able to get that back and it may require more of a rebuild,
maybe it will require some more short-term remediation, they re going through that, but that s clearly a top priority and we re thankful that fema and the army corps are there helping out. we have obviously there was a lot of folks in affected areas that evacuated, some did shelter in place. as of last night we ve contacted over 20,000 floridians that filled out a shelter in place survey on floridadisaster.org. over 10,000 have responded and all 10,000 said they were safe and the state sent the first alert late last night and are expecting more responses this morning. cellphone connectivity is sparse in some areas and sometimes easier it s easier to get out a text message, so the process has been streamlined, there s now a stand-alone site to report your location. so if you are having issues contacting your family via phone and if you are sheltering and