Florida-bound Irma lashes Puerto Rico
Category 5 hurricane devastates small islands; Canadian airlines add flights out
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Hurricane Irma lashed Puerto Rico with heavy rain and powerful winds Wednesday night, leaving nearly 900,000 people without power as authorities struggled to get aid to small Caribbean islands already devastated by the storm.
Florida rushed to prepare for a possible direct hit on the Miami area by the Category 5 storm with potentially catastrophic winds of 300 kilometres an hour.
Nearly every building on the island of Barbuda was damaged when the eye of the storm passed almost directly overhead early Wednesday and about 60 per cent of the island’s roughly 1,400 people were left homeless, Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne said.
“Either they were totally demolished or they would have lost their roof,” Browne said after returning to Antigua from a plane trip to the neighbouring island. “It is just really a horrendous situation.”
He said roads and telecommunications systems were destroyed and recovery will take months, if not years. A two-year-old child was killed as a family tried to escape a damaged home during the storm, Browne said.
Air Transat said it sent 10 planes to the Dominican Republic to pick up passengers ahead of Irma.
Air Canada said Wednesday night that it was operating 24 additional flights to bring customers home from the Dominican Republic, Florida, Cuba and other locations in Irma’s path.
As the storm moved west, it tore up the small islands in its path. Significant effects were reported on St. Martin, an island split between French and Dutch control. Photos and video circulating on social media showed major damage to the airport in Philipsburg and the coastal village of Marigot heavily flooded. France sent emergency food and water rations there and to the French island of St. Bart’s, where Irma ripped off roofs and knocked out all electricity. Dutch marines who flew to St. Martin and two other Dutch islands hammered by Irma reported extensive damage but no deaths or injuries.
By Wednesday evening, the centre of the storm was 80 km north of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and heading west-northwest at 26 km/h.
More than half the island of Puerto Rico was without power and nearly 50,000 without water, the U.S. territory’s emergency management agency said. Fourteen hospitals were using generators after losing power, and trees and light poles were strewn across roads.
The U.S. National Weather Service said Puerto Rico had not seen a hurricane of Irma’s magnitude since hurricane San Felipe in 1928, which killed 2,748 people in Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico and Florida.
U.S. President Donald Trump this week approved an emergency declaration for the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. That means the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other agencies can remove debris and give other services, largely paid for by the U.S. government.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Irma’s winds would fluctuate, but the storm would likely remain at Category 4 or 5 for the next day or two as it roared past the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, the Turks & Caicos and parts of the Bahamas. Evacuations from high-risk areas were ordered throughout the path of the storm.
By early Sunday, Irma is expected to hit Florida, where Gov. Rick Scott said he planned to activate 7,000 National Guard soldiers by Friday and warned that Irma is “bigger, faster and stronger” than Hurricane Andrew. Andrew pummeled south Florida 25 years ago and wiped out entire neighbourhoods with ferocious winds.
Trump also declared an emergency in Florida, and authorities in the Bahamas said they were evacuating six southern islands.
Experts worried that Irma could rake the entire Florida east coast from Miami to Jacksonville and then head into Savannah, Georgia, and the Carolinas, striking highly populated and developed areas.
Also Wednesday, tropical storm Katia formed in the Gulf of Mexico off Mexico’s coast and became a hurricane. Mexico’s government issued a hurricane watch for the coast of Veracruz state.