Are Swept Away Building Sites Gravestones From Hurricane Michael?

Dozens upon dozens of homes and businesses swept away in
Mexico Beach, Florida after Hurricane Michael

SATURDAY P.M. UPDATE

Some rather hopeful news from Reuters:

Searchers are really beginning to dig deeper into the nook and crannies in the worst of the Hurricane Michael zone and finding plenty of survivors

More than 500 of the roughly 2,100 people reported missing have been found alive. Officials expect to find many more survivors over the weekend.

Many of the missing were simply cut off by debris, wrecked homes, and cellular service cut off  by the storm.

Roughly 1,700 search and rescue workers were combing the wreckage this weekend. When they find survivors, they take pictures of them and forward the photos to worried relatives to ease their minds, Reuters said. .

Some of the stories are still harrowing, though. As Reuters reports:

"Rescue crews heard cries for help and cut into a mobile home crumpled by the storm in Panama City, freeing survivors who had been trapped inside for two days, Matthew Marchetti, co-founder of the Houston-based CrowdSource Rescue, said on Saturday."

This tells me the search is still definitely a rescue mission more than a body recovery mission, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, the death toll is still expected to rise, however.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

One of the most haunting images I've been seeing from the areas of Florida wiped out by Hurricane Michael are the swept-clean concrete slabs.

Aerial photos and videos show dozens and dozens of these flat slabs in Mexico Beach, Florida and elsewhere.

Each slab is where a house, condo, business or other building stood. The winds and storm surge swept everything away. You'd never know buildings stood there, save for those thin, flat slabs.

I'm getting more and more worried those slabs are symbolic gravestones. How many people stayed behind along the coast as Hurricane Michael roared in? And how many died?

At last check the death toll from Hurricane Michael was 17. Those deaths hit from Florida to Virginia, where Michael's last swipe unleashed high winds, tornadoes and flash flooding. The death toll of 17 is terrible, but seems relatively modest for a storm that ferocious.

But there are increasing signs that possibly, a lot more people died, which makes this whole story even more tragic.

There is so much debris and destruction in Mexico Beach and surrounding towns that relief workers and searchers are only just beginning to arrive and poke through the rubble.  If people died, I'm not sure they will ever find the bodies. Were they swept out to sea in the departing storm surge toward the end of the hurricane? Are they lost in the broken logs and sticks that before Michael were dense pine forests just inland?

ABC News reported yesterday there are a "tremendous number" of people still unaccounted for after the hurricane. Perhaps some of them are safe, scattered in shelters across the Southeast with no decent post-storm cell phone service to tell relatives where they are. That would be the best case scenario.

There are extreme challenges in the search for the dead and injured, Bay County, Florida Emergency Services Chief Mark Bowen told ABC on Friday. 

"Fire stations are destroyed, police stations are destroyed... Public safety agencies are only taking highest priority calls right now -- heart attacks, you know, major trauma. An enormous amount of 911 calls are going unresponded to because we've got this priority to search and rescue. So it's a terrible thing."

The Associated Press reported that one body had been found in Mexico Beach. But in one glimmer of hope, the AP says authorities have canceled plans, at least for now, to set up a temporary morgue to handle casualties. That suggests there might not be a huge number of deceased.

This is one of the most grim weather blog posts I have written, but it is facts, and we have to deal with them.

Here's a heartbreaking Washington Post video of Mexico Beach, showing the destruction, interviews with shell-shocked residents, all with the haunting background sounds of dozens of alarms blaring in shattered buildings: