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NAPLES, Florida (CNN) — Hurricane Wilma battered Florida with heavy rain, widespread flooding and damaging winds for about six hours Monday before heading out to the Atlantic and regaining strength.
At least six people were killed by the storm, including a man in Loxahatchee who was moving a van during the height of the storm when a tree branch slammed through the windshield, authorities said.
Local officials reported “a lot of power outages, a lot of coastal flooding, a lot of broken windows in high-rise buildings, a lot of roofs that are going to need a lot of repair,” said R. David Paulison, acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“It looks like Lee and Collier counties are the most heavily damaged,” Paulison said. (Watch Wilmas damage in Florida — 1:53)
Those two counties — along the southwest coast and home to tourist destinations of Naples, Sanibel Island and Marco Island — were among those heavily damaged when Hurricane Charley swept ashore last year with 145 mph winds.
Paulison said search-and-rescue teams were beginning to canvas the region, and authorities were especially concerned about mobile home parks where residents may have ridden out the storm.
More than 3.2 million homes and businesses were without power, affecting more than 6 million people.
About 36,000 people were staying in 124 shelters set up across the state, Paulison said. Nineteen airports — including Miami International Airport — were closed, he said.
The storm made landfall as a powerful Category 3 hurricane with top winds of 125 mph at 6:30 a.m. ET on Cape Romano, about 22 miles south of Naples, and pushed across Gullivan Bay and the Ten Thousand Islands and into the Everglades.
It then raced across Florida as a Category 2 storm with top winds around 100 mph, causing damage from Palm Beach to Miami and as far south as Key West. By late afternoon the storm was well into the Atlantic and had regained Category 3 status with 125-mph winds. (Watch Wilma uproot a tree in Miami — 1:22)
Rural Glades County, inland from the southwestern coast, reported “significant damage to their mobile home parks,” Paulison said. “So well be looking at those very carefully with our search-and-rescue teams.”
Significant hurricane storm surge swamped Lake Okeechobee and parts of the southwestern coastline, where the highest surge occurred, said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Earlier, Gov. Jeb Bush warned people in hurricane-ravaged areas to remain indoors as long as possible. (Watch Bush warn Floridians — 3:26)
As of 8 p.m., Wilma had passed the Bahamas and was 350 miles (560 kilometers) south of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, moving northeast at 38 mph, according to hurricane center.
The center said the storm was expected to increase in forward speed overnight, putting it “a few hundred miles” southeast of North Carolinas Outer Banks Tuesday morning.
It could reach the Canadian Maritimes by late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, the center said.
CNN meteorologist Jacqui Jeras said Wilma would weaken and “basically turn into a noreaster-type system,” pushing wet, windy and cold air from the Atlantic into New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
Hurricane fatigue
The Florida Keys took a hit early Monday morning as the southern eye wall brushed Key West, leaving much of the southernmost city in the continental United States under 3 to 5 feet of water.
Islands closer to the mainland took on even more water, with some swamped by a 5- to 8-foot storm surge. (Watch one woman ride the storm out — 3:45)
The airport in Key West was closed by flooding, with a hospital also shut down and a fire station damaged. A “significant” number of Florida hospitals sustained damage, said state Health Secretary Alan Levine.
Wilma was the eighth hurricane to hit the state in 15 months, and officials said they were concerned that thousands of people ignored a mandatory evacuation order in the Florida Keys.
On Monday, some Keys residents questioned their decisions