Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s Urban Search and Rescue Team Traveling to Help Ian Victims – NBC 6 South Florida

Members of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s Urban Search and Rescue team will travel to portions of the state on Thursday to help victims impacted by Hurricane Ian.

The team’s Florida Task Force One is being deployed from the county’s Emergency Operations Center in Doral to portions of the state struck Wednesday by the storm that was tied for the fifth strongest of all time.

The team specializes in 12 areas, including command and control, technical search, structural assessment and stabilization, planning/technical information, advanced medical care including physicians and medical specialists, hazardous materials mitigation, tactical communications, logistics support, and safety and rescue specialists. 

With maximum sustained winds at 150 mph, just 7 mph short of a Category 5 hurricane, Ian made landfall around 3:05 p.m. Wednesday in Cayo Costa, near a portion of the state’s heavily populated Gulf Coast near Fort Myers, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

Hundreds of thousands of Floridians had been given mandatory evacuation orders in anticipation of powerful storm surge, high winds and flooding rains from Ian. More than two million power outages were reported throughout the state, the website PowerOutage.us said.

Forecasters had said the area where Ian made landfall could be inundated by a storm surge of up to 18 feet.