Morning Wire XX
[0] Hey, I'm Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.
[1] It's Thursday, September 29th, and this is your Morning Wire afternoon update.
[2] Hurricane Ian wreaked havoc on the west coast of Florida Wednesday afternoon into Thursday morning, leaving more than 2 million residents without power and costing millions, if not billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure and homes.
[3] President Joe Biden has declared the damage to be a federal emergency, and FEMA director, D. Anne Criswell, said this to CNN.
[4] The footprint that this storm is going to leave is going to be catastrophic across the state of Florida.
[5] So it's going to be a very complicated recovery process.
[6] So we're going to focus right now on saving lives and what we can do to stabilize this incident.
[7] Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is warning millions of residents that extreme flooding still poses a threat, including the people miles away from where the storm made landfall.
[8] Right now, if you look in central Florida, you're looking at potential major flooding and orange and Seminole counties, St. John's River, all the way up potentially into northeast Florida in Jacksonville.
[9] The amount of water that's been rising and will likely continue to rise today, even as the storm is passing, is basically a 500 -year flood event.
[10] The Florida governor also thanked more than two dozen states who have sent aid so far to help with the recovery efforts.
[11] I want to thank the 26 states that have sent us support, including Tennessee, Virginia, Montana, New York, Colorado, Indiana, New Jersey, and Georgia.
[12] The official death toll will not be revealed for several days, if not weeks, but some authorities are already predicting that it will be in the thousands.
[13] Across the state, officials like Sarasota's police chief are warning residents to stay off the roads and to not attempt to return to their homes Thursday due to the amount of debris and potential danger.
[14] I just want to make sure that everyone understands that we're in this together.
[15] We're one community, one family, and we want to make.
[16] sure that we recover as quickly as possible.
[17] On Thursday, Ian was downgraded to a tropical storm, but the National Hurricane Center announced that it will be a hurricane again by the end of the day as it makes its way towards Georgia and South Carolina.
[18] In other news, Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was interviewed Thursday morning by the House January 6th Committee, according to multiple sources.
[19] And Russian President Vladimir Putin will officially sign papers on Friday, stating that Russia has annexed four areas of Ukraine following a referendum vote that the West has dismissed as a sham vote.
[20] Well, those are your drive -home updates this afternoon.
[21] To learn more about these stories, go to dailywire .com, and for more in -depth discussion of the biggest stories of the day, listen to the latest full episode of Morningwire every morning.
[22] From all of us here at Morningwire, we hope you're enjoying the show.
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