Lawmakers must remember the pain of Hurricane Ian, as two more bodies are found | Opinion

The heartbreak of Hurricane Ian continues. Divers on Friday found the body of the last known missing person in Lee County after the Category 4 storm hit Southwest Florida, bringing the county’s death toll to 75 and the state’s to 146.

This time it was a 72-year-old man, James Hurst, whose body was found on his sunken sailboat, named “Good Girl,” where he had been living. His daughter told The New York Times that Hurst, known as Denny, had refused to evacuate before the monster storm made landfall on Sept. 28.

Lee County waited a day longer than surrounding counties to order vulnerable residents to leave, a decision — based on the belief that the storm would go farther north — that becomes more questionable with every death. Many of the victims of the storm were older adults, and many drowned.

And his wasn’t the only body recently recovered. Three days before Hurst’s body was discovered — in wreckage that hadn’t been noticed before — a debris-cleaning crew found another victim. The body of 82-year-old Ilonka Knes was discovered deep in the mangroves in a canal. She had been missing since her Fort Myers Beach home was destroyed. Her husband was also killed in the storm.

The two additional deaths come just as lawmakers in Tallahassee begin preparing for another legislative session that includes two committees focused on hurricanes and resiliency. Already, there are signs that the work is going off track.

The committees, one each in the House and Senate, are focusing on issues such as more prompt removal of derelict vessels after a storm and making sure local government contracts spell out the specific kind of debris removal needed.

Both ideas may have merit when it comes to speeding up the recovery process, but there has also been talk about trying to shield the names of storm victims from the public in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane.

We understand the impulse to prevent unscrupulous people from exploiting victims, but after a storm, relatives need to be able to locate their loved ones — and that means allowing the use of their names. Crowd-sourcing can be critical after a major disaster. Keeping the names of the missing out of the public eye is simply a non-starter.

It’s also a misplaced effort. Rather than trying to restrict information after a storm, Florida needs to work on preventing deaths — and that includes thinking hard about evacuations — for the next storm.

Because there will be a next one.

This story was originally published January 17, 2023 at 4:42 PM.