Chilling Time Lapse: It’s the devastating power of a hurricane

Stormchaser Max Olson was already in the coastal town of Fort Myers before he really escaped there and snagged a camera on a street on the beach. The camera weathered the storm and kept rolling the whole time. Olson whittled down the hours-long footage to this chilling timelapse:

At first it’s clear things are going well, but another car drives down the road and it doesn’t seem too bad. Then the water enters the street.

The door will open shortly

You can see the door to the house open briefly in the middle of the screen. The resident seems to take in how bad it is and goes back inside. At the end of the video – a few hours later – the house no longer exists.

Stormchaser Olson reports that the residents of the house and their two dogs all survived. They didn’t leave the house until she literally walked away.

Their home wasn’t the only building in Fort Myers that didn’t weather the storm. We went to see the city when the water had receded:

Ian was a Category 4 hurricane, the second highest category. The hurricane killed at least 80 people, almost all of them in the US state of Florida, where Ian made landfall near Fort Myers. It is not known how many people were injured and the exact amount of damage.