IRMA CLOSES IN ON FLORIDA
STORM THAT DEVASTATED CARIBBEAN HAS LOST INTENSITY, BUT GROWN IN SIZE
Hurricane loses intensity, but gets bigger
Looting broke out Friday after Hurricane Irma surged through paradise Caribbean islands like a chainsaw, cutting through anything that stood in its way. In Barbuda, a woman told how a two-year-old child died after being ripped from her arms by the storm’s 300 km/h winds.
Eli Fuller, an Antigua-based volunteer who reached Barbuda, broke down in tears describing his encounter with the woman.
Fuller said, “She came down to the dock and she had bandages all over her face, which was busted in. And she says, ‘I was the lady who lost the child.’ She had her arm around a post after the roof blew off and walls caving in, and she had her other arm around the child. She said the wind just pulled the child out of her hand. And that was the last time she saw the child. Then they found the child dead the next morning.”
As Irma leaves behind death and destruction in the Caribbean, president Donald Trump warned the United States faced a disaster of historic proportions.
“This is a storm of absolutely historic destructive potential,” Trump said. “Hurricane Irma is of epic proportion, perhaps bigger than we have ever seen. Be safe and get out of its way if possible.”
Irma was expected to come ashore in Florida with sustained winds of 240 km/h.
About 1.4 million people in Florida and Georgia were ordered to leave their homes, leading to gridlock on motorways heading north. Authorities opened hundreds of shelters for people who did not leave.
Fights reportedly broke out as fuel supplies ran short, with many gas stations running out, and those staying behind cleared shops of food, water, and wood to board up their homes.
Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott said, “This is a catastrophic storm like our state has never seen. Look at the size of this storm. It is wider than our entire state.”
Downtown Miami was a ghost town as residents left, and shops in Miami Beach were boarded up. Roseanne Lesack, a motorist heading out of Florida with her family, said. “It’s just three lanes of red bumper lights.”
Manny Zuniga, taking his family, two dogs and pet ferret to Arkansas, said, “We’re getting out of this state. Irma is going to take all of Florida.”
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., was among the buildings ordered to be evacuated.
Several small communities around Lake Okeechobee in the south-central part of Florida were added to the evacuation list because the lake may overflow — but Scott added that engineers expect the protective dike to hold up.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez said he planned for enough space to hold 100,000 people before the storm arrives, although most shelters were only beginning to fill on Friday.
“You don’t have to go a long way. You can go to a shelter in your county,” Scott said.
The latest forecast shifted the most powerful part of the storm to the west of the Miami metropolitan area that is home to some six million people, but hurricaneforce winds are still likely there.
“Irma is likely to make landfall in Florida as a dangerous major hurricane, and will bring life-threatening wind impacts to much of the state regardless of the exact track of the centre,” the National Hurricane Center said in its forecast.
Officials warned that if people telephoned emergency services during the storm “nobody will pick up the phone”.
There were long queues at airports as many Floridians tried to fly out. But in Key Largo some said they planned to ride out the storm on sailing boats.
There were also fears for people living in 54,000 mobile homes in trailer parks across Florida, many of whom do not have cars and could not evacuate.
Lindsay Reiter, manager of a trailer park where more than 100 people were staying behind in flimsy structures, said, “There will be casualties.”
Tom Bossert, Trump’s Homeland Security adviser, issued a final warning for people to leave. He said: “There will come a point where you are on your own.”
Florida’s two nuclear plants were also in line for a possible direct hit from Irma, but they are braced and ready, the plants’ owners said Friday.
“We have tried-and-true processes in place,” Eric Silagy, chief executive of NextEra Energy’s Florida Power & Light subsidiary, said.
With winds that peaked at 300 km/h, Irma was once the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the open Atlantic.
Irma’s weakening comes at a cost. When that happened, its hurricane-force wind field expanded greatly, to about 180 kilometres wide, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director at the private service Weather Underground.
“It’s a big storm,” Masters said. “It’s not as big as Katrina, but it is definitely a large hurricane now.”
Even as forecasts showed the storm’s centre could enter Georgia far inland after churning up the Florida peninsula, Gov. Nathan Deal urged nearly 540,000 coastal residents to evacuate, noting Irma’s path remains unpredictable. Forecasts show it could enter the state Monday anywhere from the Atlantic coast to the Alabama state line.