they were covered, water over the mailboxes. i need you to get up in there, and i m going to hand her to you, and and you ve got to hold her. [background sounds] i m surrounded here by stress is els that were in this marina, tossed around really like tinker toys. that was my house. my house is gone. a lot of people can say that today here, lost everything. neil: an incredible week, and it s not over. just some of the incredible images we ve seen throughout this week brought on by a pretty ruthless hurricane ian. many southwest florida homes leveled and communities destroyed. more than three dozen lives lost and now warnings of a potential levee break that could cause a 15-foot surge. in the carolinas, some similar scenes. hundreds of thousands still in the dark there as they try to assess the havoc caused by ian. we re following it all with nate foy in myrtle beach, south carolina, alexandria hoff in hard-hit fort myers, florida, and ache rick reich newt reichmuth
who s telling us that no confirmation of that, just that the river is, indeed, surging, and an abundance of caution, they have closed i-75 in both directions, again, about a 14-mile chunk. we ll keep you posted on that, also on what s going on right now in florida and in fort myers, of course, that got the bankrupt of this storm. that s where brunt of this storm storm. alexandria hoff. reporter: so good to be with you right now. wert at a distribution site in port meyers. it opened up at 7:00 this morning, and it has been a constant line of cars. i mean, we have seen hundreds coming in here as the national guard handing out food, water, ice and basic supplies like blankets to people. while here we ve been talking to people because they re waiting a while, so we ve talked to people, and there s been a surprising amount of gratitude, optimism coming from this storm. once you look at those aerial images that we ve been seeing, you really understand why that look from overhead, fort my
take quite a blow yesterday, neil, as i mentioned. neil: you did. one thing i was wondering, and we ve seen some drone shots of the island. i mean, it looked like it was pretty badly damaged but not entirely wiped out as was the case with sanibel island in florida. maybe you can update us on that. sure. the damage that we saw in southwest florida in sanibel and port meyers was certainly catastrophic. we did not experience that. we had moderate erosion. we recently did a beach renourishment about who years ago which was fortunate, because if we had not done that, the damage here on this island would have been significant. but the damage it structurally, ill say, 90 miss, 99% of the houses are structurally sound. we lost, obviously, our pier that everyone loved, and on the back side of the island many, many docks and walkways were washed into the marsh on the back side of the island. the roadways have a lot of sand