Hurricane Ian makes landfall in Florida as category 4 storm

In United States, Hurricane Ian made landfall on the southwest coast of Florida as a monster Category 4 storm with powerful winds and torrential rains threatening to cause catastrophic damage and flooding.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, the eye of the extremely dangerous hurricane slammed into the barrier island of Cayo Costa, west of the city of Fort Myers. Dramatic television footage showed churning water submerging roads and sweeping away cars as the hurricane pounded the coastal city of Naples to the south of Fort Myers.

The NHC said, Ian was packing maximum sustained winds of 240 kilometers per hour when it made landfall, causing catastrophic storm surge, winds and flooding in the Florida peninsula. Ian is expected to affect several million people across Florida and in the southeastern states of Georgia and South Carolina.

Some 2.5 million people were under mandatory evacuation orders in a dozen coastal Florida counties, with several dozen shelters set up, and voluntary evacuation recommended in others. Airports in Tampa and Orlando stopped all commercial flights, and eight lakh fifty thousand households were already without power.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said, state and federal responders were assigning thousands of personnel to address the storm response.

Ian, a day, earlier had plunged all of Cuba into darkness after battering the country’s west as a Category 3 storm and downing the island’s power network. Cuban state media reported, at least two people died in Pinar del Rio province.