ORLANDO, Fla. — The emergency call came from the nursing home shortly after 5 a.m.: Water was seeping into the low-slung, low-lying complex called Avante at Orlando and threatening its 106 residents, some of them too frail to walk.
By daybreak, dozens of rescue workers had descended on Avante, which bills itself as a skilled nursing and rehabilitation center. The water in the building was about a foot deep, but it was perhaps as high as three feet in the parking lot outside. Many of the patients, in their 80s or 90s, were wheeled out on cots, their white sheets billowing in the whipping winds trailing Hurricane Ian, their faces filled with fear and confusion.
Soon, however, they were safe — if shaken and wet — in vans and buses bound for shelters and hospitals.
As epic rain and high wind pounded much of central Florida on Thursday, a picture emerged of what the storm had wrought, from wrenching catastrophe to mere gale-force inconvenience. The battered landscape ranged from utter devastation on the southwestern coast to wearily familiar flooding in St. Augustine near the state’s northeastern edge.
Rescue teams worked feverishly to retrieve people from the barrier islands near Cape Coral, and wrecked boats and drifts of rotting debris piled up along the eviscerated beach in Fort Myers. In Arcadia, Fla., about an hour to the north, the quaint historic district was a ravaged display of broken glass and blown-out storefronts. Water had swallowed a swath of West Oak Street, on the east end of the bridge that spans Peace River, and a DeSoto County Sheriff’s deputy implored a line of drivers not to attempt to cross on Thursday.
“It’s at your own risk,” he said to car after car. “We’re not going to tow you or be able to get you out if you’re stuck. Do you understand?” Behind him, a small four-door car stalled.
Elsewhere, however, many inland survivors viewed the storm as a worst-case scenario averted.
“It’s a cliché, but we got lucky,” Paul Womble, the director of emergency management in Polk County in central Florida, said, noting that anticipated tornadoes had failed to materialize and that no injuries had been reported. Due east of Tampa Bay, the county had first braced for complete disaster, with the hurricane seemingly headed straight for it, and then for two feet of rain as the storm shifted south, as well as a massive surge in the already swollen Peace River.
But the hurricane had spent a good deal of its force by the time it hit the southern end of the county, and the damage, Mr. Womble said, was limited mostly to power outages and a carpet of debris, branches and snapped power poles. Cleanup would be substantial, he said, but Hurricane Irma in 2017 probably would turn out to have been more destructive.
In the small town of Bartow, Pete Miranda, a Polk County resident for half a century, was relieved but still shaken.
“Dude, it was bad,” said Mr. Miranda, who was raking up branches near his home at a battered-but-still-standing mobile home park. A former oil driller, he said he had stayed behind to watch for looters but the storm was far more violent than he had expected.
“It was whistling at me like it was a woman,” he said. “But don’t get me wrong — it was scary.”
Where Ian passed as a still powerful but somewhat diminished Category 3 storm, the landscape just inland from the Gulf Coast looked rattled but not ruined.
Giant oaks lay broken next to highways covered in thick carpets of leaves and Spanish moss, cow pastures were now small lakes, and the aluminum roof of one gas station plaza was slam-dunked into the ground.
Power crews were everywhere, and so was the work cut out for them, with utility poles snapped and dangling on their own sagging power lines. In towns and even small cities, traffic lights were mostly dark, and the cars and trucks waited hesitantly at each intersection. Gas stations were mostly out of service.
North of the storm’s track, while people were busy clearing huge mats of debris from roofs and porches, the homes themselves were mostly still standing. The low-lying areas of some towns — places that local officials said had routinely flooded in Charley and Irma and even some recent bad storms — had flooded again but not as severely as they had at times in the past.
But the closer one got to Fort Myers, the reports of damage became more dire. Large parts of Hardee County, a rural area that was devastated by Charley in 2004, were flooded on Thursday, and the sheriff’s department said in a Facebook post that the waters were still rising. “Search and rescue missions are still underway,” the post said. “It will be dark soon.”
In Orlando, the heart of the state’s tourist industry, the mayor of surrounding Orange County said about only half of the two feet of predicted rain had fallen, and Disney World said its theme parks would resume operation on Friday in a phased reopening.
Still, the Orlando neighborhood of Rio Pinar Estates had become a giant, impassible lake as the mayor briefed the public, and some 200,000 residents were without electricity. The houses, many of them broad, one-story ranches, had not gone under, although many had taken on water: In the street, it appeared to be three feet deep or more in places. Rescue crews had taken out some residents in boats.
At around 11 a.m., Ava King, who lives in the last house before the water started, was yelling at the driver of a pickup truck that was nosing into the water. “I wouldn’t do it,” she hollered.
The truck was in up to its headlights. It slowly backed up.
Inside her house, the power was out, and towels were all over the floor. A little water had seeped in, and a creek that runs behind the house was engorged and took up the entire backyard. Ms. King’s neighbor, Jessica Murphy, 39, was sprawled out on a sofa. She lived two doors down. She said she had to swim to Ms. King’s house.
“About midnight, I noticed that there was water coming in. By 3 a.m. it was to my knees,” Ms. Murphy said. She was alone; her three children were with her ex-husband. And she was worried about water in her power outlets. She struggled to figure out how to cut off the electricity. “I didn’t know if it was safest to stay or safest to go,” she said. She called Ms. King and said she was coming over.
“I tried to get out my front door. It wouldn’t open because there was so much water on the other side,” she said. “So I had to go out the boys’ room window in the front of the house.”
She didn’t know how long it would take to fix up her place and make it livable again. For now, she said, she was going to live with her father.
“He’s dry,” she said of his house. “He’s bone dry.”
Rick Rojas and Michael Majchrowicz contributed reporting.
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