Biased media hit Florida before Ian

And if you don’t think that’s what the journalists have been doing in the wake of Hurricane Ian, you need to look back to before the storm struck Florida’s west coast.

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Already at that point, they were attempting to lay the groundwork for a storyline about a supposedly “lax response to the storm so far,” as one reporter put it in a press conference.

DeSantis was not going to hear one word of it.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa — give me a break,” he sharply interrupted the questioner. “That is nonsense. Stop politicizing, OK? Stop it. We declared a state of emergency when this thing wasn’t even formed. We’ve had people in here. We’ve had counties that have done a lot of hard work. And honestly, you’re trying to attack me. I get it. But you’re attacking these other people who’ve worked very hard. So that’s just totally false.”

The insinuation that somehow Florida was not well prepared for Ian is deeply unfair and also untrue. This applies both to the evacuation preparations before the storm and to the equally important preparations to save lives afterward and restore vital services to storm-damaged areas.

Neither process is ever perfect. But both have been performed so far in Florida with admirable efficiency, compassion, and concern for human life under circumstances that can only be described as extreme, even for Florida in hurricane season.

It should be noted that since the storm passed, the volume of successful rescues — there were more than 1,600 — and the rapid restoration of services after Ian hit testify to fantastic storm preparation at every level of government. (This is clearly not Florida’s first rodeo nor the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s.) The reviews from Floridians on the latter have been overwhelmingly positive so far in spite of political media efforts to generate dissatisfaction.

As for the evacuation, there were extenuating circumstances. When Ian veered away from the densely populated Tampa Bay area, it unfortunately plunged directly into the Fort Myers metropolitan area to the south. This caught everyone, the media, the meteorologists, DeSantis, and the local authorities alike, by surprise.

The storm’s sudden change in trajectory rendered a formerly safe area unsafe. As DeSantis himself pointed out, some people had actually evacuated Tampa and gone to Fort Myers for safety, based on the best advice that meteorological science had to offer just 72 hours before the storm made landfall. Unfortunately, this precaution put them right in Ian’s path, like something out of a Greek tragedy. Sometimes, you can take all the right precautions, and things still go wrong.

Thus authorities in Lee County found themselves a day behind where they should have otherwise been in evacuating. Between that delay and the typical reluctance of some people to evacuate or go to shelters, at least 54 people in that county had been pronounced dead as of this writing, accounting for more than half of the deaths tallied in Florida so far.

Both DeSantis and the Biden administration’s FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell, have rightly defended Lee County’s response rather than use it as an excuse to play politics.

“As soon as the storm predictions were that it was going to impact Lee County, I know that local officials immediately put the right measures in place to make sure that they were warning citizens to get them out of harm’s way,” Criswell said.

As of this writing, Ian’s death toll in Florida stands at over 100 and is expected to rise. It was the deadliest Caribbean hurricane since 2000, exceeding Irma in 2017, which left 77 dead in Florida.

But considering Ian’s unexpected turn and its direct hit on a metropolitan area with 770,000 residents, every reasonable person recognizes that the combined planning and efforts of state, local, and federal officials have prevented a much greater tragedy.

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