Deanne Criswell, Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator, instructed CNN’s New Day Wednesday that Hurricane Ian could have catastrophic impacts and warned individuals who haven’t evacuated to make positive they had been placing themselves and their households in a secure place.
“This is going to be catastrophic impacts, and not just where we’re going to see the storm make landfall, but we’re also really concerned about all of the inland flooding because it’s bringing with it a lot of rain and it’s going to move slowly,” she stated. “Which means people that are in the path, they are going to experience the impacts for a long period of time.”
Criswell stated her greatest concern is the water, each the storm surge and the inland flooding water, as water is without doubt one of the main causes of loss of life in these storms.
FEMA has put collectively search and rescue groups, she stated, that are presently stationed in Miami and embrace folks from a variety of teams, together with the Department of Defense and the US Coast Guard.
Criswell stated they’re already seeing the impacts from the storm.
“As the storm moves and as it’s safe for our search and rescue teams to go in, they will begin going in to start searching those areas to see and assess damage, but most importantly look for people that may need help getting out of the area,” she stated. “We’re going to follow this storm as soon as it’s safe for those teams to get in there and make sure that we’re finding anybody who needs help.”
“If you have not evacuated yet, you need to stay, you need to shelter in place, you need to get to the highest part of your home and you need to make sure that you are putting yourself and your family in a safe place until emergency responders can get to you,” Criswell stated, including that they received’t await the storm to utterly move, however till FEMA says it’s secure for emergency responders.
“But just because they’re out, doesn’t mean that individuals should be out, they need to stay put until the storm completely passes,” she stated. “And then when they do go out, they need to be really cautious, so many dangers that are going to be out there with the flooding, the water, the downed power lines, a lot of dangers our there even after the storm passes.”
