After devastating Florida, Hurricane Ian begins to wind down

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Ian made landfall on Friday afternoon near Georgetown, South Carolina, as a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 85 miles (140 kilometers) per hour.

It was later downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, and by 5 am Saturday (0900 GMT) its sustained windspeeds had decreased to near 35 miles per hour as it passed through North Carolina, according to the NHC.

Though the NHC said heavy rains continued and "limited" flooding was still possible across the central Appalachians and Mid-Atlantic as Ian moved north, the storm was expected to continue weakening and was "forecast to dissipate over south-central Virginia" by Saturday night.

As for storm-ravaged Florida, President Joe Biden said Friday: "We're just beginning to see the scale of the destruction.

"It's likely to rank among the worst in the nation's history," he said of Ian, which barreled into Florida's southwest coast on Wednesday as a Category 4 storm, a tick shy of the most powerful on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

The death toll from the storm stood at 23, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said Friday evening.

News outlets quoting county officials have given even higher tolls, with CNN saying 45 fatalities have been blamed on Ian.

Seventeen migrants also remain missing from a boat that sank during the hurricane on Wednesday, according to the Coast Guard. One person was found dead and nine others rescued, including four Cubans who swam to shore in the Florida Keys.

With damage estimates running into the tens of billions of dollars, Biden said it's "going to take months, years to rebuild."

"It's not just a crisis for Florida," he said. "This is an American crisis."

CoreLogic, a firm that specializes in property analysis, said wind-related losses for residential and commercial properties in Florida could cost insurers up to $32 billion while flooding losses could go as high as $15 billion.

"This is the costliest Florida storm since Hurricane Andrew made landfall in 1992," CoreLogic's Tom Larsen said.