At least 21 people have died in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, revealed in a Friday morning update.
Guthrie broke down the fatalities county by county during a press conference alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
“So where we stand right now on fatalities is, I’ll break this down by county. We have one confirmed fatality in Polk County. We have 12 unconfirmed fatalities in Charlotte County. We have eight unconfirmed fatalities in Collier County, and we’re still processing through the situation with the hasty search that I mentioned before in Lee County,” he said.
On Thursday, DeSantis identified both Lee and Charlotte counties as essentially “off the grid,” as they had the most direct impact of the then-Category 4 storm.
Guthrie explained that people sometimes die in disaster, but it has nothing to do with the actual disaster. That is where the medical examiner comes in, ultimately making that determination.
“They are the lead agency at the local level to determine when they investigate that — this is either disaster related or not disaster related,” he said.
“You’ve heard the governor and I talk about this now for about three or four days. There is a direct death– in other words, storm surge, rising water things of that nature or indirect, the stuff that led up to it after the fact,” he continued
“So with that being said, we have 12 unconfirmed fatalities In Charlotte County. We have eight unconfirmed fatalities in Collier County. We have one confirmed fatality in in Polk County. So that brings us up to 21 total,” Guthrie continued, detailing what search and rescue teams are witnessing.
“We do have an identified situation that was done during the hasty search of some fatalities. We do not know exactly how many were in the house, and let me paint the picture for you. The water was up over the rooftop,” he said, noting that a Coast Guard rescue swimmer swam to it, “and he could identify that it appeared to be human remains.”
“We do not know exactly how many. We do not know what the situation is. And before we comment on that, we know we want to be transparent, but we just don’t know that number, and we got a couple of other situations where we had that particular type situation,” he said. “So right now the number we’re going with is we have 21.”
He reemphasized again that of those, 20 are unconfirmed fatalities and one is confirmed.
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