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By helicopter, ATV, even bicycle, a door-to-door hunt for Ian victims

October 8, 2022 at 10:52 a.m. EDT
Residents of Sanibel Island, Fla., are moved to a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter on Sept. 30, 2022, after enduring Hurricane Ian on the island. (Steve Helber/AP)
9 min

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Holding out hope that dropping anchor in Estero Bay would keep him safe, Jay Burki hunkered down in his 37-foot sailboat as Hurricane Ian screamed ashore. But as the ocean surged and winds surpassed 100 mph, the anchor ripped away from the vessel, Burki said, flinging the slender, longhaired mariner and his sloop ashore over the tops of trees and shrubs.

“It’s not the first time that I’ve washed ashore, and it won’t be the last,” Burki said, sitting on the porch of a storm-ravaged beach bar here on San Carlos Island. “But I never dreamed I’d end up in the woods. Not with a sailboat of that size.”

Burki, 76, said he was rescued after the storm by a Coast Guard helicopter, becoming one of more than 1,000 people the service has rescued or assisted since the storm made landfall on Sept. 28. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Thursday that first responders had rescued more than 2,500 people across the state.

The deadly storm has prompted a sprawling search-and-rescue effort that could continue for days, with first responders canvassing neighborhoods with cadaver dogs, knocking on doors looking for people who need help, and using axes, pry bars and sledgehammers to force their way into homes with possible storm victims.

The effort is directed by local authorities but has included the Coast Guard and out-of-town search-and-rescue teams, many affiliated with fire departments in other parts of the country. Many arrived in Florida before the storm, hunkering down on the eastern side of the state as the storm arrived so they could respond as soon as it had passed.

In interviews, first responders described an environment along Florida’s western coast that appeared post-apocalyptic. Dozens of people have been killed in the state’s deadliest hurricane since 1935, but rescue teams said they encountered many other Floridians who survived brushes with death. The death toll is expected to rise as rescue teams move through additional neighborhoods.

“It’s surreal,” said Coast Guard Petty Officer James Lowen, a rescue swimmer who helped evacuate survivors from Sanibel Island, off the coast of Fort Myers. “You couldn’t help but feel for them. I was wondering who these people were, whether they’re ever going to come back to it, and what I would think if it was my house.”

A door-to-door hunt

Among the teams staged in advance to help local authorities were two urban search-and-rescue teams from Virginia. Virginia Task Force 1, of Fairfax County, deployed with 45 people, and Virginia Task Force 2, of Virginia Beach, sent about 80. They report to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates outside support.

The Fairfax County team staged in Miami ahead of the storm, traveling west on Interstate 75 through the Everglades to get to storm-ravaged areas the following morning. Team members initially joined the effort in Charlotte County, paddling on small boats to reach Little Gasparilla Island, a tiny coastal community with no bridges linking them to mainland Florida. A few people rode out the storm there, the firefighters said, but no one needed help.

Elsewhere in Charlotte County and in Lee County, to the south, the Fairfax County team focused heavily on trailer parks at the request of local officials.

“We get a lot of intel from folks living in the neighborhoods,” said Lt. Brian Gillingham, a member of the team. “The first thing we ask, is: ‘Hey, how high did the water come up? Do you know of anybody who didn’t evacuate? Do you know of anyone who is missing?’ And that’s how we kind of figure out how we’re going to deal with that neighborhood.”

In the coastal Iona neighborhood of Fort Myers, the team visited the Tropicana mobile home neighborhood. Residents told them that a large alligator — a “double humper,” they were told — had been kept as a pet in a fenced-in area. But storm surge had washed away the fence, and it was not clear whether the alligator was lurking nearby.

In the same neighborhood, residents said they helped a disabled man who did not wish to leave ahead of the storm by leaving him with inflatable “floaties” and life preservers. The man survived and was evacuated, neighbors told the team, after floating in water four or five feet high in his home at the height of the storm, said Capt. Rob Clement.

“This wasn’t just floating,” said another member of the team, Capt. Mark Menton. “He was floating in a washing machine of all of his furniture, all of his belongings, everything circulating around.”

The Fairfax County team did not encounter any human remains in the first several days after the storm. But they were informed that other authorities had responded to a death in an area they also canvassed, they said.

On Tuesday afternoon, members of the Virginia Beach team searched through the rubble of Fort Myers Beach’s Red Coconut RV Park with hand tools and cadaver dogs. Rescuers wondered whether anyone had stayed behind at the beachfront park and was swept away by storm surge. But they couldn’t be sure, because they had no list of the missing.

On Wednesday, the team received a large-capacity end loader, a nimble excavator that could move layers of debris and a skid steer that could move quickly to push debris out of the way. But they still didn’t know whether anyone was under the rubble.

Cadaver dogs ran over the piles, barking when they thought they detected human remains. The rescuers would follow, looking — and smelling — for any hint that a body might be present. By the end of Wednesday, the team had found only a dead cat.

“We don’t know where anyone is,” said Daryl Funaiock, a task force leader. “You can assume that everyone evacuated, but you don’t assume that. You assume they stayed.”

Funaiock compared the search on Fort Myers Beach to the team’s work at the site of the 2021 condominium collapse in Surfside, Fla. There, teams had split into 12-hour shifts, working through the night, carefully digging for residents. Because of the way the building had pancaked, rescuers could pinpoint which floor and unit fell where. They knew who should have been in each apartment and which room they could have been in, getting detailed information from family members about each victim.

In Fort Myers Beach, the wind and water had pushed homes into each other, blending bits and pieces of buildings and depositing the stacks far from their points of origin. Team members guessed who might have lived where. Because there weren’t as many toys as there were in the rubble at Surfside, they surmised that more retirees lived in the community.

On Friday, the Fairfax County team was searching around Pine Island on house boats and other structures that were difficult to reach by land, said Adam Hall, a member of the team.

Searches also continued Friday on Sanibel Island, with members of Florida Task Force 1 involved, said Lt. Jairo Rodriguez, a rescue manager on the Florida team. That team had carried out cursory “hasty searches” for several days, he said, but moved Thursday to more deliberative efforts that included using dogs and breaching homes with hand tools.

Searchers have been able to do more in the past couple of days while collaborating with the Florida National Guard, Rodriguez said. Guard personnel have delivered all-terrain vehicles and other heavy equipment.

“The damage is a lot of muck, a lot of structural wind damage,” Rodriguez said. “A lot of the structures have been completely wiped out from their foundations.”

An unusual mission

In the Coast Guard, 42 small-boat teams and 37 helicopters, some from out of state, were staged to respond to the storm, said Adm. Kevin Lunday, the commander of the Coast Guard Atlantic Area. Some went into action before the storm had completely cleared the area.

“They made a very deliberate decision to launch with one of our most experienced pilots and crews ... during the middle of the night while the storm was raging,” Lunday said.

In one of the first rescues that night, a 43-foot civilian vessel was taking on water off the coast of North Bradenton, Fla. Its occupants called 911 to say they were abandoning the vessel, said Lt. Cmdr. Dan Schrader, a Coast Guard spokesman.

The rescue crew went out in an MH-60 helicopter in winds gusting to 45 mph, recovering three people from the water and taking them to Tampa General Hospital, Schrader said.

The Coast Guard continued helicopter rescues for several days. In one case, Lowen, a rescue swimmer dispatched from his usual assignment in Traverse City, Mich., landed on Sanibel Island on Sept. 30 and encountered a man who said he knew where there was someone who needed help.

Lowen borrowed a bicycle — a beach cruiser complete with basket on the handlebars — and drove with the man more than a mile through the devastation, he said. They stopped at several other houses along the way, passing flipped-over cars, a house that had burned and other sites that had been ravaged by the storm surge, all as the Coast Guard helicopter assessed the neighborhood from above.

“The tires were good, the brakes were good,” Lowen said. “So I looked at him and said, ‘Okay, let’s roll. Show me what you can show me.’”

The man stopped him at a three-story home less than a mile from the Sanibel Causeway, which was destroyed in the storm. Inside were an elderly man and woman and a dog, sitting on their couch surrounded by debris. The man, who walked with a cane, and the woman agreed to leave with Lowen.

Lowen, who has since returned to Michigan, said he has heard some jokes from colleagues about taking a bicycle as a rescue swimmer. But it seemed like a good idea.

“It’s not like anyone has ever heard of a rescue swimmer being on a bicycle,” he said, but “it would have taken way longer to just walk.”