A day after Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday that the storm surge that came with it was “basically a 500-year flood event.” “We’ve never seen a flood event like this,” he said during a news briefing in Tallahassee. “We’ve never seen a storm surge of this magnitude.”

More than 2.5 million people across the state were without power as search and rescue teams and first responders assessed the historic damage. Large sections of the Sanibel Causeway, which connects the Sanibel Islands to the mainland, collapsed into the Gulf of Mexico.

DeSantis said the causeway and Matlacha Pass Bridge are “impassable” and are going to require “structural” rebuilds. Lee County, which includes Fort Myers, was particularly hard hit. On NBC’s “Today” show, Mayor Kevin Anderson, who has lived in the city since the 1970s, said Ian was “by far the worst storm” he’d ever seen.


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Hundereds of people have been feared dead in Florida after Hurricane Ian made landfall on Wednesday afternoon, battering the state with 150mph winds and flooding entire counties. The storm has left a path of destruction across the Sunshine State, knocking out power grids and submerging dozens of homes underwater, prompting Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno to fear the worst.

Marceno told Good Morning America on Thursday that he “definitely knows” fatalities are in the hundreds. The Lee County sheriff said: “Thousands of people are waiting to be rescued, I cannot give a true assessment until we are on scene assessing each scene, and we can’t access people that is the problem.” He described Hurricane Ian as “a life-changing event” for everyone as he said the storm was “unpredictable.” He revealed that crews “cannot access many of the people in need,” adding that thousands are waiting to be rescued.

Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that two deaths have been reported so far, stressing that Marceno’s estimate is not confirmed. “You’re looking at a storm that has changed the character of a significant part of our state,” DeSantis said. “This is going to require years of effort to rebuild.”President Joe Biden has since declared a major disaster for Florida.  A 72-year-old man in Deltona is believed to be the first fatality, according to WESH.