Photo: YAMIL LAGE / AFP / Getty Images
Hurricane Ian made landfall shortly after 2: 18 pm Wednesday as a Category 4 storm, AccuWeather forecasters reported.
The storm made landfall near North Captiva Island , reported Accuweather.
Ian made landfall with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph, according to meteorologists.
Satellite images show the catastrophic storm hitting the southwestern coast of Florida. The area around Fort Myers and Miami is expected to bear the brunt of the impact.
The landfall came less than an hour after Governor Ron DeSantis assured Floridians that the state was “ready” for the Category 4 storm.
The hurricane is already “causing storm surge , winds and catastrophic flooding” in southwest Florida early Wednesday afternoon at the start of what could be a disaster track across the peninsula.
The National Hurricane Center said the massive Category 4 storm was already taking a heavy toll on the southwestern Gulf Coast.
The most immediate and life-threatening concern was storm surge from Gulf of Mexico waters pushed inland by Ian.
Numerous videos posted on the Internet showed torrents of seawater rapidly filling the streets of Sanibel and Fort Myers Beach.
Naples also reported a record rise of six feet. Early, sections of Key West were flooding.
Surge forecasts from the National Hurricane Center soared to 18 feet for Englewood to Bonita Bay, a forecast so high that a new color was added to the National Center’s peak storm surge forecast map of Hurricanes.
The worst of that storm surge is expected after landfall and later tonight.
Ian was also hitting much of Florida with hurricane and tropical storm force winds and will dump torrential rains estimated at up to two feet as it slowly crosses the state today and into Thursday.
Ian was a massive storm and by Wednesday morning, its outer bands were hitting Southwest Florida with gusts up to 80 mph as the eyewall hit Sanibel and Capt. VAT.
South Florida saw tornadoes overnight that flipped small planes and toppled large trees, and Key West recorded one of its highest overnight storm surge levels.
Seawater still remained in many neighborhoods, including on sections of famous Duval Street and inside homes.
Governor Ron DeSantis said Wednesday afternoon that more than 155,000 people had already lost power, which qualified as a “drop in the ocean of what will happen in the next 24 hours”.