Catastrophic Hurricane Ian To Be One Of Most Expensive Weather Disaster In U.S. History

Satellite image of Hurricane Ian this morning as
it got ready to make landfall along the west
coast of Florida later today. 

 The news with Hurricane Ian just seems to be getting worse and worse. 

I awoke earlier this morning to the news that Ian was just shy of Category 5 status, with top winds of 155 mph.  It is now now on track to be among the most intense hurricanes on record to hit the United States. 

If Ian maintains those 155 mph winds at landfall, it will be the fifth strongest hurricane to hit the U.S.  Even if it does start to weaken before landfall, it's too late. It won't weaken enough to prevent most of the inevitable carnage with this.

I expect there's a high chance that Ian will be among the top five, or at least top 10 most expensive hurricanes in U.S. history. 

The winds will cause immense destruction, but that's the least of it.  

Incredible storm surge flooding in populated areas is expected to unfold as Ian makes landfall probably mid to late afternoon today. The storm surge might be as high as 18 feet above normal water levels in and around Port Charlotte.

 That figure is actually higher than forecasts from earlier this morning. The extent of the storm surge also depends on the timing of high tides, of course. 

There's more bad news there. As of this morning, the storm surge is expected to come in roughly around the time of high tides.  

Storm surges are easily the most dangerous of all the deep hazards of a strong hurricane. The quick surges of water are accompanied by battering waves because of all the wind. Even in a protected harbor the winds stir up strong currents and waves.  

A disturbing screen shot I took of the Naples, Florida pier
at around 10:15 a.m. People foolishly there as Hurricane Ian's
immense storm surge began to make its way toward shore.

So not only does the water get into buildings, it batters those very buildings. I imagine many will not hold up under the onslaught. 

I saw some useful slide maps on a Twitter thread this morning by Evan Fisher, and you can click on this link to see. It shows the areas expected to be inundated by Ian's storm surge in Cape Coral, Port Charlotte, Punta Gorda and Naples, Florida. 

The maps show thousands of buildings flooded. I hope all of the 2 million people who were asked to evacuate did so. Sometimes, people don't evacuate because they can't afford it. Gas, lodging, food, everything else costs money and not everybody has that saved up. I don't know the income levels of the neighborhoods in Evan Fisher's flood maps, so I don't know how big a problem this is.

Now, if anybody changed their minds, it's too late. Conditions outside are too rough to evacuate as of this morning.  All anybody can do if they didn't evacuate but should have is to hunker down and hope for the best. 

The only glimmer of good-ish news in this storm surge forecast is it now appears Hurricane Ian will make landfall south of Tampa Bay, not north of that location.  That will somewhat limit the storm surge in Tampa Bay. Forecasts there call for four to six feet of surge. That's really, really bad, but not as terrible as it could have been. 

The other enormous problem with Ian will be inland flooding. The storm's forward motion is at a crawl, so rainfall rates of up to three inches per hour will linger over the same spots for a long time. Up to 20 inches of rain is in the forecast for western, central and northeastern Florida. Extreme flooding will result. 

This particular danger zone includes the Orlando metro area, which can expect more than a foot of rain and winds gusting to well over hurricane force at times. Not surprisingly, Disney World is closed, for only the eight time since 1971.

Even before the main show, Ian has already caused a lot of damage. Key West suffered its third highest storm surge on record last night. Outer rain bands spit out tornadoes that caused damage in scattered areas of the state

Conditions were rapidly going downhill in southwestern Florida by mid-morning. As of mid-morning in southwestern Florida, wind gusts were approaching hurricane strength along the coast. Heavy rain was lashing most of western and central Florida already. 

Up until now, this had been a fairly quiet hurricane season, at least compared to recent years. But they've always said even in quiet years, it only takes one to create a cataclysm.  Ian is tragically proving that point.