Hurricane Ian was an especially challenging natural phenomenon for hydrological, meteorological, and geographical reasons.
Ian was a Category 4 — almost Category 5 — hurricane. That meant wherever it came ashore, it was going to wreck things. It carried storm surge of more than 12 feet when it made landfall, enough to inundate practically all of Lee County, Florida, where the eyewall met the continental United States.
And it wasn't supposed to target Lee County, which centers around the mid-sized coastal cities of Cape Coral and Fort Myers. It was supposed to dive into the west coast of Florida to the north — originally in and around the Tampa Bay area, and then to the south toward Sarasota. But Ian duck-hooked into Lee County and absolutely trashed the place, doing billions of dollars of property damage in the beachfront county of 760,000 people and killing at least 54 people there.
Lots of them didn't evacuate because people don't like to evacuate their homes when a hurricane comes. Evacuating means you're a refugee, and it means, all too often, that you end up in a strange place with barely any possessions. Riding out the storm is usually preferable, no matter what the local officials say.
And even in the case of Hurricane Ian, with its 155 mph winds, riding out the storm is generally not fatal.
But sometimes it is. For over 100 people, it was.
And to the media ghouls who have descended on Florida in the aftermath of Ian, TV cameras and stupid questions in tow, those 101 fatalities are golden.
Why? Because with 101 corpses to feast upon, the local officials in Lee County who didn't sufficiently browbeat the beachfront residents in barrier island communities like Sanibel, Captiva, and Fort Myers Beach are now dessert for what Rush Limbaugh used to call the "drive-by" media.
And by extension, those local officials have become proxies for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1576568676559605761
DeSantis is, as Kurt Schlichter described him, the ...
No hoodwinking or hornswoggling here.
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