The largely innocuous but soggy remnants of Hurricane Ian drifted through Virginia early on Sunday, leaving in their wake storm-ravaged residents in Florida and the Carolinas facing a disaster recovery expected to cost tens of billions of dollars.

The storm’s toll on human life also was expected to rise as floodwaters receded and search teams pushed farther into areas initially cut off from the outside world, seeking stranded survivors and the remains of anyone who may have perished.

At least 50 storm-related deaths have been confirmed since Ian crashed ashore Florida’s Gulf Coast with catastrophic force on Wednesday.

Ian has diminished into an ever-weakening post-tropical cyclone, with the National Hurricane Centre (NHC) lifting all remaining watches and warnings related to the fading weather system by Saturday evening.

The NHC said heavy additional rainfall was possible across portions of West Virginia and western Maryland into Sunday morning, even as “major to record flooding” was forecast to continue in central Florida.

As the full scope of devastation came into clearer focus days after Ian struck, officials said some of the heaviest damage was inflicted by raging wind-driven ocean surf that rushed into seaside communities and washed buildings away.

As of Friday, some 10,000 people were reported unaccounted for in Florida, according to the state’s emergency management director. He said many of those would likely turn out have merely been displaced and unreachable due to power and phone outages.

About 996,000 businesses and homes remained without power as of late Saturday night in Florida alone, where more than 2 million customers lost electricity the first night of the storm.

Insurers braced for between $28 billion and $47 billion in claims from what could amount to the costliest Florida storm since Hurricane Andrew in 1992, according to US property data and analytics company CoreLogic.

Nod to action on Imran

Islamabad: Pakistan’s cabinet on Sunday formally decided to launch legal action against former Premier Imran Khan over his audio leaks in which he could allegedly be heard discussing the controversial US cypher and how to exploit it to portray his ouster in April as a conspiracy, according to a media report.

PTI