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Hurricane Ian updates: Storm downgrades to cyclone after South Carolina landfall; death toll rises in Florida
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Florida death toll from Hurricane Ian rose to 33 Friday afternoon, ABC News reports, as Florida authorities on Friday afternoon confirmed several drowning deaths and other fatalities.
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement said the deaths included a 22-year-old woman who was ejected from an ATV rollover on Friday because of a road washout in Manatee County and a 71-year-old man who died of head injuries when he fell off a roof while putting up rain shutters on Wednesday. Many of the other deaths were drownings, including a 68-year-old woman who was swept into the ocean by a wave.
Another three people died in Cuba as the storm made its way north earlier in the week. The death toll was expected to increase substantially when emergency officials have an opportunity to search many areas hardest hit by the storm.
Ian made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane with winds at 85 mph near Georgetown, South Carolina, just after 2 p.m. Friday. It was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone hours later.
Click here for live radar and the latest forecast on Ian’s path.
PHOTOS: Haunting aerial images show Hurricane Ian’s aftermath in Fort Myers, Sanibel Island
Damaged homes and debris are shown in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022, in Fort Myers Beach, Fla.
AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
A revived Hurricane Ian battered coastal South Carolina on Friday, ripping apart piers and filling neighborhoods with calf-high water, after the deadly storm caused catastrophic damage in Florida and trapped thousands in their homes.
Ian’s center came ashore near Georgetown with much weaker winds than when it crossed Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday as one of the strongest storms to ever hit the U.S. As it moved across South Carolina, Ian dropped from a hurricane to a post-tropical cyclone.
Sheets of rain whipped trees and power lines and left many areas on Charleston’s downtown peninsula under water. Four piers along the coast, including two at Myrtle Beach, collapsed into the churning waves and washed away. Online cameras showed seawater filling neighborhoods in Garden City to calf level.
Ian left a broad swath of destruction in Florida, flooding areas on both of its coasts, tearing homes from their slabs, demolishing beachfront businesses and leaving more than 2 million people without power. At least nine people were confirmed dead in the U.S. – a number that was expected to increase as officials confirm more deaths and search for people.
Rescue crews piloted boats and waded through riverine streets Thursday to save thousands of people trapped amid flooded homes and shattered buildings.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that crews had gone door-to-door to over 3,000 homes in the hardest-hit areas.
“There’s really been a Herculean effort,” he said during a news conference in Tallahassee.
Among those killed were an 80-year-old woman and a 94-year-old man who relied on oxygen machines that stopped working amid power outages, as well as a 67-year-old man who was waiting to be rescued and fell into rising water inside his home, authorities said.
Officials fear the death toll could rise substantially, given the wide territory swamped by the storm.
Florida Division of Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie said responders have focused so far on “hasty” searches, aimed at emergency rescues and initial assessments, which will be followed by two additional waves of searches. Initial responders who come across possible remains are leaving them without confirming, he said Friday, describing as an example the case of a submerged home.
“The water was up over the rooftop, right, but we had a Coast Guard rescue swimmer swim down into it and he could identify that it appeared to be human remains. We do not know exactly how many,” Guthrie said.
Desperate to locate and rescue their loved ones, social media users shared phone numbers, addresses and photos of their family members and friends online for anyone who can check on them.
MORE: Chunk of Sanibel Causeway falls into sea during Ian, cutting off Florida island where 6.3K live
A damaged causeway to Sanibel Island is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian, Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022, near Sanibel Island, Fla.
AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
Orlando residents returned to flooded homes Friday, rolling up their pants to wade through muddy, knee-high water in their streets. Friends of Ramon Rodriguez dropped off ice, bottled water and hot coffee at the entrance to his subdivision, where 10 of the 50 homes were flooded and the road looked like a lake. He had no power or food at his house, and his car was trapped by the water.
“There’s water everywhere,” Rodriguez said. “The situation here is pretty bad.”
University of Central Florida students living at an apartment complex near the Orlando campus arrived to retrieve possessions from their waterlogged units.
Deandra Smith, a nursing student, was asleep when others evacuated and stayed in her third-floor apartment with her dog. Other students helped get her to dry land Friday by pushing her through the flooded parking lot on a pontoon. She wasn’t sure if she should go back to her parents home in South Florida or find a shelter so she can still attend classes. “I’m still trying to figure it out,” she said.
RELATED: Hurricane Ian leaves trail of destruction in Florida, with estimates of billions in damage
The devastating storm surge destroyed many older homes on the barrier island of Sanibel, Florida, and gouged crevices into its sand dunes. Taller condominium buildings were intact but with the bottom floor blown out. Trees and utility poles were strewn everywhere.
Municipal rescuers, private teams and the Coast Guard used boats and helicopters Friday to evacuate residents who stayed for the storm and then were cut off from the mainland when a causeway collapsed. Volunteers who went to the island on personal watercraft helped escort an elderly couple to an area where Coast Guard rescuers took them aboard a helicopter.
Hours after weakening to a tropical storm while crossing the Florida peninsula, Ian regained strength Thursday evening over the Atlantic. Ian made landfall in South Carolina with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph (140 kph). When it hit Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, it was a powerful Category 4 hurricane with 150 mph (240 kph).
After the heaviest of the rainfall blew through Charleston, Will Shalosky examined a large elm tree in front of his house that had fallen across his downtown street. He noted the damage could have been much worse.
RELATED: Hurricane Ian could cause $65 billion in damage
“If this tree has fallen a different way, it would be in our house,” Shalosky said. “It’s pretty scary, pretty jarring.”
In North Carolina, heavy rain bands and winds crept into the state Friday afternoon. Gov. Roy Cooper warned residents to be vigilant, given that up to 8 inches (20.3 centimeters) of rain could fall in some areas, with high winds.
“Hurricane Ian is at our door. Expect drenching rain and sustained heavy winds over most of our state,” Cooper said. “Our message today is simple: Be smart and be safe.”
In Washington, President Joe Biden said he was directing “every possible action be taken to save lives and get help to survivors.”
“It’s going to take months, years to rebuild,” Biden said.
“I just want the people of Florida to know, we see what you’re going through and we’re with you.”
___
Gomez Licon reported from Punta Gorda, Florida; Associated Press contributors include Terry Spencer and Tim Reynolds in Fort Myers, Florida; Cody Jackson in Tampa, Florida; Freida Frisaro in Miami; Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida; Seth Borenstein in Washington; and Bobby Caina Calvan in New York.
ABC News contributed to this report
Copyright © 2022 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Citi picks China stocks that stand out against a spate of downgrades
NASA downgrades a large asteroid’s risk of impact in 2880
A fresh assessment of a distantly risky asteroid brings good news: it’s even less of a threat than astronomers had feared.
The chances of an asteroid dubbed 1950 DA crashing into Earth were always tiny and long in the future: As of 2015, scientists had calculated that the object had a 1 in 8,000 chance of impacting Earth in the year 2880. But a new analysis released on Tuesday (March 29) knocks the asteroid out of the top spot of NASA’s list of known asteroids that are most potentially hazardous to Earth.
“1950 DA should not be of any concern,” Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told Space.com in an e-mail. “Rather, I’d say that it is encouraging that we can identify the remote possibility of an impact for this object more than 800 years in advance.”
Related: If an asteroid really threatened the Earth, what would a planetary defense mission look like?
The space rock is 0.8 miles wide (1.3 kilometers), and scientists have a pretty good idea of its shape, thanks to observations by the the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Modeling previously suggested the asteroid is more rubble than rock, which would defuse any possible impact.
Fortunately, the new assessment says the asteroid poses even less risk than previously believed. “The probability of impact is tiny, 1 in 30,000,” Farnocchia wrote of the asteroid, a substantial improvement from the previous odds. “But even in the very unlikely case that 1950 DA were on an impact trajectory, the possible impact is in 2880 and that provides plenty of time for mitigation,” he added.
NASA’s mandate includes seeking out and monitoring asteroids like 1950 DA through partner telescopes and space observations, coordinated through the agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. There are no impending threats to worry about now, but NASA periodically revisits old assessments to make sure they are accurate.
In January, the agency upgraded its Sentry system for examining asteroid risk. Among the notable changes were better predictions for the Yarkovsky effect, or alterations to an asteroid’s path in space due to heating from the sun.
The effect has a particularly strong influence on the orbit of 1950 DA, and for years, NASA had been calculating asteroid trajectories using a 2002 program called Sentry that couldn’t factor in the Yarkovsky effect.
Instead, Farnocchia and his colleagues would have to simulate a large number of scenarios in what he called “a somewhat brute force approach.” Then, the scientists had to analyze the results directly to identify possible impacts and probabilities.
So when scientists got new observations of 1950 DA, they didn’t bother re-running the impact risks.
However, the new system, called Sentry-II, can account for the Yarkovsky effect, allowing it to automatically calculate impact risks without all the extra work, so 1950 DA got its first new assessment since 2015. The new analysis with Sentry-II only took a few hours, and was processed automatically, and will be repeated more regularly.
The lower risk assessment moved 1950 DA to second place on NASA’s watch-list. Now in the top spot goes to Bennu, the asteroid that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission sampled in October 2020. The spacecraft will deliver its samples to 2023, giving scientists a detailed look at the rock and, not coincidentally, helping them assess whether the asteroid poses any threat for a window opening in the year 2178.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct a typo in one instance of 1950 DA. Reporting contributed by Space.com senior writer Meghan Bartels. Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
China downgrades diplomatic ties with Lithuania over Taiwan
BEIJING/VILNIUS, Nov 21 (Reuters) – China downgraded its diplomatic ties with Lithuania on Sunday, expressing strong dissatisfaction with the Baltic State for allowing Taiwan to open a de facto embassy there and raising tensions in a row that has dragged in Washington.
China views self-ruled and democratically governed Taiwan as its territory with no right to the trappings of a state and has stepped up pressure on countries to downgrade or sever their relations with the island, even non-official ones.
Beijing had already expressed anger this summer when Lithuania – which has formal relations with China and not Taiwan – allowed it to open an office in the country using the name Taiwan. China recalled its ambassador in August.
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Other Taiwan offices in Europe and the United States use the name of the city Taipei, avoiding reference to the island itself. However, the Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania finally opened on Thursday.
China’s Foreign Ministry said in a brusque statement that Lithuania had ignored China’s “solemn stance” and the basic norms of international relations.
The move “undermined China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs”, creating a “bad precedent internationally”, it said.
Beijing said relations would be downgraded to the level of charge d’affaires, a rung below ambassador.
“We urge the Lithuanian side to correct its mistakes immediately and not to underestimate the Chinese people’s firm determination and staunch resolve to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.” l
No matter what Taiwan does, it cannot change the fact that it is part of China, the ministry said.
RIGHT TO COOPERATE
Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry expressed “regret” over China’s decision in a statement on Sunday.
“Accepting the Taiwanese representation in Lithuania is grounded on economic interests,” it said.
“Lithuanian again confirms it keeps to the ‘one China’ policy, but at the same time it has the right to expand cooperation with Taiwan and to accept, and to establish, non-diplomatic representations to ensure practical development of the connections, as has been done by many other countries.”
Taiwan says it is an independent country called the Republic of China, its official name, and that the People’s Republic of China has never ruled it and has no right to speak for it.
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council denounced China’s “rudeness and arrogance”, saying Beijing had no right to comment on something that was not an internal Chinese affair and purely a matter between Taiwan and Lithuania.
Taiwan’s Defence Ministry later on Sunday reported two Chinese nuclear-capable H-6 bombers had flown to the south of the island, part of a pattern of what Taipei views as military harassment designed to pressure the government.
Taiwan has been heartened by growing international support in the face of China’s military and diplomatic pressure, especially from the United States and some of its allies.
Washington rejects attempts by other countries to interfere in Lithuania’s relationship with Taiwan, U.S. Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya told a news conference in Vilnius on Friday.
Washington has offered Vilnius support to withstand Chinese pressure and Lithuania will sign a $600 million export credit agreement with the U.S. Export-Import Bank on Wednesday.
Only 15 countries have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Taipei could lose another ally to Beijing after the Honduran presidential election later this month, where a candidate backed by main opposition parties is leading in opinion polls.
If elected, Xiomara Castro has vowed to establish official relations with China.
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Reporting by Norihiko Shirouzu and Cheng Leng in Beijing, Ben Blanchard in Taipei and Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Michael Perry, William Mallard and David Clarke
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
China downgrades its diplomatic ties with Lithuania over Taiwan issue
China views self-ruled and democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory with no right to the trappings of a state, and has stepped up pressure on countries to downgrade or sever their relations with the island, even non-official ones.
Beijing had already expressed anger that Lithuania — which has formal relations with China and not Taiwan — let Taiwan open its office in the country, and recalled its ambassador in August.
The Taiwanese Representative Office in Lithuania opened on Thursday. Other Taiwan offices in Europe and the United States use the name of the city Taipei, avoiding a reference to the island itself, something that has further angered Beijing.
China’s Foreign Ministry said in a brusque statement that Lithuania ignored China’s “solemn stance” and the basic norms of international relations in allowing Taiwan to set up its representative office in Lithuania.
The move “undermined China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs,” creating a “bad precedent internationally,” it said, adding relations would be downgraded to the level of charge d’affaires, a rung below ambassador.
“We urge the Lithuanian side to correct its mistakes immediately and not to underestimate the Chinese people’s firm determination and staunch resolve to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
No matter what Taiwan does, it cannot change the fact that it is part of China, the ministry added.
Taiwan says it is an independent country called the Republic of China, its official name, and that the People’s Republic of China has never ruled it and has no right to speak for it.
Taiwan has been heartened by growing international support for it in the face of China’s military and diplomatic pressure, especially from the United States and some of its allies.
Washington has offered Vilnius support to withstand Chinese pressure, and Lithuania will sign a $600 million export credit agreement with the U.S. Export-Import Bank this week.
Only 15 countries have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Taipei could lose another ally to Beijing after the Honduran presidential election later this month, where a candidate backed by main opposition parties is leading in opinion polls.
If elected, Xiomara Castro has vowed to establish official relations with China.