Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Saturday defended the state’s early preparations for Hurricane Ian as questions remain over whether hard-hit areas received enough advance warning to evacuate.
DeSantis said local officials in Lee County — where Ian made landfall Wednesday as a Category 4 hurricane — acted appropriately when they issued evacuation orders on Tuesday, after the storm’s forecasted path had shifted from the eastern Panhandle to Tampa Bay and eventually further south to the Fort Myers area.
Several other counties in southwest Florida and west-central Florida — including Charlotte County, immediately to the north of Lee — had issued mandatory evacuation orders for their barrier islands on Monday, offering crucial extra time for people to depart a low-lying region with few major escape routes. The National Hurricane Center warned Monday that the region from Fort Myers to Tampa Bay faced the highest risk of storm surge, regardless of Ian’s exact path.
Even so, DeSantis pointed to the ample public warnings early this week that Ian posed a catastrophic danger to the flood-prone Tampa Bay region, which had not taken a direct hit from a major hurricane in more than a century.
“When we went to bed Monday night, people were saying this is a direct hit on Tampa Bay — worst case scenario for the state,” DeSantis said during a news briefing in Fort Myers on Saturday.
The Republican governor’s defense is part of what could become a long debate about the region’s warnings and preparations for Ian, one of the most destructive hurricanes ever to hit the United States.
The cone????
By the way, that’s official, not a “sharpie” cone.
I don’t know that DeSantis will be on the hot seat over any of this. The media generally is pretty easy on him. But you never know.
On the other hand, thisindicates they aren’t giving up on the odious migrant abduction story:
The political mystique of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rests partly on the illusion that he wields absolute “own the libs” mastery over the various assorted enemies the right has decided to hate these days. It’s why he’s seen as a 2024 GOP contender who has the capacity to channel the ugliest of MAGA pathologies even more effectively than Donald Trump did.
But new revelations about DeSantis’s flying of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — including the unmasking of “Perla,” who allegedly scammed them into getting onto planes — show why this illusion will be increasingly difficult to pull off.
The New York Times has now identified that person as Perla Huerta, describing her as a “former combat medic and counterintelligence agent.” This opens the door to a host of new inquiries that could implicate DeSantis more deeply in the scheme’s sordid aspects.
Will it? I dunno. He’s running around in his windbreaker and I don’t see a lot of appetite for nailing the guy.