The stays of a Florida man who had been lacking since his sailboat disappeared throughout Hurricane Ian in September have been discovered, officers mentioned, days after one other storm sufferer’s stays have been found in the identical county.
Divers for the Lee County Sheriff’s Office discovered the stays of the person, James Hurst, on his sunken sailboat, in the Matanzas Pass space of the harbor in Fort Myers Beach, alongside Florida’s southwest coast. The boat, named “Good Girl,” had been docked at Island Bay Marina and was noticed throughout the harbor final week at a really low tide, the sheriff’s workplace mentioned. The stays have been recognized on Sunday.
Mr. Hurst, 72, often known as Denny, had been dwelling on the boat when Ian made landfall in September. His daughter Shannon Vaughan mentioned on Monday in an interview that he had refused to evacuate.
Lee County, which incorporates Fort Myers and surrounding barrier islands, skilled some of essentially the most extreme devastation from Ian, and Mr. Hurst had been the realm’s closing lacking particular person from the storm.
The discovery of his stays got here three days after a debris removal company found the remains of Ilonka Knes, 82, who had been lacking since her house in Fort Myers Beach was destroyed through the hurricane.
“I hope this discovery can bring the family some closure,” Sheriff Carmine Marceno of Lee County mentioned on the time. Officials mentioned that Ms. Knes almost certainly drowned. Her husband was additionally killed in the storm.
Ian, Florida’s deadliest hurricane since 1935, killed 75 folks in Lee County and 147 in the state total, officers mentioned.
The hurricane hit Florida’s southwest coast on Sept. 28 as a Category 4 storm, bringing punishing winds, unrelenting rains and devastating flooding. Scientists with NASA mentioned final 12 months that sea surface temperatures have been very hot off Florida’s southwest coast, permitting the storm to choose up vitality simply earlier than making landfall north of Fort Myers.
Lee County waited a day longer than surrounding counties to order its most susceptible residents to evacuate. Officials mentioned that call was based mostly on predictions that the hurricane would head farther north.
Statistics on who was killed by the storm present that older people died in larger numbers. Older adults can face a number of obstacles when deciding whether or not to evacuate when a storm approaches; some of them require medical gear, or can not drive, or can not simply sleep in a makeshift shelter.
Derrick Bryson Taylor contributed reporting, and Sheelagh McNeill contributed analysis.