More than 2.5 Florida million homes and business were without power early Thursday.
Hundreds were feared dead Thursday and thousands of Floridians desperately sought rescue as historically powerful Hurricane Ian hammered the state with heavy rain and strong winds,
one of the strongest storms in U.S. history.
"While I don't have confirmed numbers, I definitely know the fatalities are in the hundreds," Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno said on ABC-TV's "Good Morning America." "There are thousands of people that are waiting to be rescued."
The hurricane’s center made landfall as a Category 4 monster Wednesday afternoon near Cayo Costa, a barrier island just west of heavily populated Fort Myers in Lee County.
Ian had weakened to a tropical storm but was forecast to continue roaring across the state most of the day before heading out into the Atlantic.The storm flooded entire communities, leaving residents stranded in their homes with battering 150-mph maximum sustained winds – just 7 mph shy of a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest on the
Saffir-Simpson Hurricane scale.