Hurricane Ian: Florida and Carolinas comb wreckage to assess deadly toll

The storm had worked its way north after slamming into Florida and slowly weakening, gathering some of its strength back from the warm Atlantic Ocean waters before hitting South Carolina on Friday. It made its second US landfall in Georgetown, 60 miles north of Charleston, destroying parts of four popular piers, including two in Myrtle Beach.

But things in North Carolina and Florida were more dire.

By Saturday morning, an estimated 1.2 million people remained without power in Florida, with hundreds of thousands more in North Carolina and thousands in Virginia, as the storm weakened to a post-tropical cyclone.

Three people died in western Cuba earlier in the week from the storm.

Meanwhile, heavy rains caused neighborhood flooding in more inland areas in central Florida. Officials closed a 14-mile stretch of Interstate 75 in Florida late Friday night because of flooding in the Myakka River.