A woman has described a harrowing ordeal in her home as Hurricane Ian passed over. Valerie Bartley said Thursday that her neighborhood in the Fort Myers area had been under an evacuation order but that she felt it was too late to leave earlier in the week with no plans in place. She and her husband had to push their dining room table against a sliding door leading to the back patio because they felt the wind was going to blow it into the house. Bartley says her 4-year-old daughter gave her courage by grabbing her hand and saying that she was scared too, but that it would be OK.

Hurricane Ian has left a path of destruction in southwest Florida, trapping people in flooded homes, damaging the roof of a hospital intensive care unit and knocking out power to 2.5 million people. It's now aiming for the Atlantic Coast as a tropical storm. One person is confirmed dead and a Florida sheriff said he believes fatalities are in the hundreds. One of the strongest hurricanes to ever hit the U.S. is drenching the Florida peninsula overnight, threatening catastrophic flooding.  Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno said they still cannot access many of the people that are in need.

Police say they have arrested a convicted bombmaker who escaped from a Nevada prison where he was serving a life sentence for a deadly 2007 explosion outside a Las Vegas Strip. Las Vegas police say they received information Wednesday night that a person matching the description of Porfirio Duarte-Herrera was in the area. The department says officers took the man into custody, confirmed he was Duarte-Herrera and arrested him. Gov. Steve Sisolak had earlier ordered an investigation into the escape after he said late Tuesday his office learned the escapee had been missing from the medium-security prison since early in the weekend. Officials didn’t realize until Tuesday morning that Duarte-Herrera was missing during a head count at Southern Desert Correctional Center near Las Vegas.

Hurricane Ian has swamped a four-story Florida hospital from both above and below, according to a doctor who works there. The storm surge flooded its lower level emergency room on Wednesday, while fierce winds tore away part of the roof from the fourth-floor intensive care unit. Dr. Birgit Bodine spent the night at HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital in Port Charlotte, anticipating the storm would make things busy. But, she says, she didn’t anticipate that the roof would blow off on the fourth floor. The damage forced patients into just two of the floors. Bodine plans to spend another night at the hospital, when incoming storm injuries could make things worse.