Irma death toll bound to increase

SOME residents are being allowed back into the Florida Keys to assess damage from Hurricane Irma as more bodies are discovered in the area.

Two US Navy amphibious assault ships were headed for the Keys yesterday to help distribute food and evacuate 10,000 people who decided to stay put during the storm.

An aircraft carrier also was due to anchor off Key West.

Monroe County Commissioner Heather Carruthers said people had been killed in the archipelago, where nearly 80,000 permanent residents live, apart from one already known fatality.

“We are finding some remains,” she told CNN.

While Irma has claimed at least 22 lives in the US and 34 in the Caribbean, authorities had warned repeatedly she had the potential to rival 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which killed almost 2000.

Irma smashed into the Keys as a category four storm, but had weakened to a category three by the time she made landfall again on Sunday.

Irma was forecast to drive a towering 4.6m storm surge that would devastate densely populated cities such as Tampa, but it was spared.

“It’s not as bad as we thought the storm surge would do,” Governor Rick Scott said.

More than half of Florida state was without power yesterday – and possibly for weeks – and some homeowners were told they might be waiting that long to return.

Governor Scott warned locals to expect “devastation”.