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
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
Storm surge comes ashore, a tremendous amount of damage. the wind is one thing, 155 miles an hour, it s going to produce a lot of wind damage, roofs, trees down, but it s the storm surge, it s the water that creates all of the tremendous damage from these hurricanes. and when you look at the size of this hurricane, too, so much bigger than charlie was, wind speed the same, but the effect felt in a much broader swath of territory. sandra, i wouldn t want to be right in the eye of this storm but there s a lot of people who probably will be and will come back to see the damage left. just look at the incredible amount of water coming across sanibel island. sandra: and the governor making that the most firm point, if you have not left you cannot leave now and he did say there are a small number of people who did hunker down, referencing this as a massive storm that is coming on shore. the eyewall coming on shore right now, the video that you were just pointing to in
Even if it is calm outside, you may be in the eye of the storm. i encourage our individuals near sanibel, fort myers area, as the eyewall starts to come on shore, if everything stops, the storm is not over. if you can hear us, if you can see us on your tv, you are most likely have a bright sunshiny area here very soon. you are in the eye of the storm. stay inside. stay indoors. do not go outside. you do not know when that eyewall will collapse. so, please stay safe. avoid downed power lines and downed trees and standing water. when it is over use extreme caution. if you see any type of line, do not cut them. do not cut fiberoptic lines. fiberoptics are the backbone of our communication system, allows us to have connectivity for your
Anticipate major structural damage in those areas. individual you don t have a take on evacuations for cape coral, just, if you look at the storm surge diagrams, looks like there is a lot of, a lot of storm surges in that area, sanibel, captiva are getting hammered, as they embrace the eye. all of those individuals were under evacuation orders. we don t have the numbers of how many, what the percent was that evacuated versus those that didn t. i would imagine since most of that same area went through charlie, they probably evacuated. again, charlie was a fraction of the size of this storm. i would imagine most people that lived through that went ahead and evacuated. i think another issue is