Fort Myers residents return to their homes under water by Hurricane Ian

Survivors of Hurricane Ian recount clinging to roofs and walls and praying for rescue as the Sunshine State awoke to heartbreaking scenes of devastation.

The Category Four storm pulverized southwestern coastal cities with 255 mph winds and swept an 18-foot “tsunami” ashore, engulfing homes, businesses and transforming entire neighborhoods into dangerous swamps.

DailyMail.com arrived in Fort Myers Thursday morning to find desperate residents begging for help as they returned home to begin the grim task of salvaging possessions and securing their water-ravaged properties.

“I’ve lost everything I own,” said 93-year-old retiree Tom Hinkle, gazing at the murky, broken water that made it impossible to reach his two-bed retirement home, about a thousand feet from the Gulf of Mexico.

“I’ve lived in my house for 22 years and it’s gone. My car is even flooded,” he added with tears in his eyes.

Hinkle made it out alive thanks to Good Samaritan Ray Remillard, 62, who gathered four elderly neighbors from the Sunshine Mobile Village, several miles from Fort Myers Beach, and took them to his company’s apartment further inland.

They returned on Thursday and found the majority of the 180 mobile homes completely beyond repair.

Worse, according to locals, several residents, including a pregnant woman, are missing.

A woman in her 90s was brought to safety Thursday morning when search and rescue teams from the McGregor Fire Department jumped into the water in dinghies.

Heavily shaken and caked in the mud, she watched the floodwaters in disbelief as she was carried and placed in an ambulance.

“Everyone is distraught. They just want to go back to their homes, but there are no homes to go back to,” Remillard explained.

“When the wind came, there wasn’t much protection. There are houses that just floated away. The carports are gone, the roofs off.

‘We have physically challenged people here, others with dementia. They didn’t ignore the warnings, they just had nowhere to go.”

Ian transformed Fort Myers and the surrounding communities of Iona and McGregor into a maze of fallen trees and rubble with overturned cars, house roofs and “hundreds” of feared deaths along the coast.

Entire streets and intersections remain under several feet of floodwater, and returning residents struggle to get through the swell, with no working traffic lights or stoplights.

Daniel Suarez, 39, and his wife Heather, 37, heeded warnings to flee their second-floor apartment, but their downstairs neighbors chose to stay behind.

“Around three o’clock in the afternoon their house was completely flooded. Their vehicle was floating in the parking lot,” Daniel told DailyMail.com.

“The water was so strong they couldn’t push the front door open, so they had to break through the drywall to the stairwell, then climb up and break into our apartment to get to safety.

“I left the man my keys, but he must have dropped them in the water in all that commotion.”

Samuel Martinez, 39, said he and his family were lulled to sleep by a false sense of security when they saw Ian head north toward Tampa.

By the time it turned east, right at them, it was too late to get a hotel.

“The governor said it was too late to flee, so we had to squat in our house,” said the Mexican resident, who has lived in the United States for 12 years.

Around 8 a.m., water began to trickle into Iona’s house. Ten minutes later it was down to two feet. It would eventually grow to be about 10 feet high.

Martinez and his four cousins ​​tried to take shelter on the roof, but the wind was too strong. They ended up clinging to an outside wall for their lives.

“It was up to our necks,” he said. “We clung to what seemed like hours of praying for the water to stop rising.

‘The house is completely destroyed, but we are still alive. But I’m worried about my neighbors, one of them is a pregnant woman.’

Martinez’s older relative Luis Rios, 79, has endured dozens of storms during his three decades as a Florida resident, but nothing like Ian’s ferocity.

“I clung to that wall with everything I had. It was very, very ugly,’ he said. “I’ve never experienced anything like this.”