As dawn neared Friday morning, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida had yet to confirm a single death from the hurricane that slammed into the state’s west coast Wednesday afternoon.
That is not unusual: It often takes days, weeks or months for a hurricane’s full casualty toll to come into focus. More than a month after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005, officials had identified only 972 of its more than 1,800 victims.
Confirming a weather-related death tends to require a lot of time and paperwork. Officials and medical examiners must first reach the body and confirm that a death has occurred, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Before they file a death certificate, they must determine whether the disaster played a role by investigating the scene and performing autopsies.
The process can be even slower when officials are preoccupied with the continuing effects of a severe hurricane like Ian. Power outages have prevented officials from receiving casualty reports, and life-threatening floodwaters have kept them from reaching bodies.
Carmine Marceno, the sheriff of Lee County in southwest Florida, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday morning that hundreds of people might have died there because of Hurricane Ian. He later spoke more cautiously in an interview with CNN, saying that “roughly five” fatalities had been confirmed and cautioning that his department did not know how many people had died in the county.
DeSantis later said that “things that have been said out there” about the storm’s death toll had not been confirmed.
“We absolutely expect to have mortality from this hurricane, but I would just caution people: There’s a process by where that is confirmed,” he said at a news conference Thursday evening. “In terms of confirmed, that will be made apparent over the coming days.”
In Fort Myers, one of the hardest-hit cities, more than 1,000 callers were still waiting for a response from the Lee County Sheriff’s Office as of early Friday morning, officers there said in phone interviews.
“We are still in the very early stages, so it is hard to say an exact time frame of when we will be announcing numbers,” said Jessie Santero, a spokesperson for the office, referring to the county’s official death toll.
At this early stage, any estimates of Ian’s death toll are largely meaningless because communications are down in places hardest hit by the storm and the search and rescue is continuing, said Laura Myers, an expert on emergency management at the University of Alabama.
Myers said that local officials will start with a long list of people who are unaccounted for and whittle it down as they find them — alive or dead — during the rescue effort. But that process will be slow and challenging because of the storm’s effects, she added.
“You can’t estimate in the beginning of this,” Myers said. “There’s just no way. Water is getting higher, that storm is still churning, they’re conducting that response, and they’re trying to find people — battling the wind, battling flooding.”
If history is any guide, a number of deaths linked to Hurricane Ian might occur far from coastal areas. From 1963 to 2012, about one-quarter of fatalities related to tropical cyclones in the United States occurred in inland counties, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Electricity failures can be a hurricane-related cause of death. Last year, after Hurricane Ida knocked out transmission lines and felled tens of thousands of utility poles, Louisiana officials attributed nine of the 26 storm-related deaths to “excessive heat during an extended power outage.”