5.6M IN FLORIDA
After devastating Caribbean islands, Hurricane Irma expected to wreak havoc on US mainland
HAVANA
SAUDI FOREIGN MINISTRY, Official greater devastation was sure to be caused as Irma moved westward through Sancti Spiritus and Villa Clara provinces where it was forecast to turn north towards Florida.
“We are running out of time. If you are in an evacuation zone, you need to go now. This is a catastrophic storm like our state has never seen,” Florida Governor Rick Scott said.
The Florida Division of Emergency Management said 25 per cent of the state’s population, were ordered to evacuate. The US has been hit by only three category five storms since 1851, and Irma is far larger than the last one in 1992, Hurricane Andrew, said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
President Donald Trump said Irma was “a storm of absolutely historic destructive potential” and called on people to heed recommendations from government officials and law enforcement. In Palm Beach, Trump’s waterfront Mar-a-Lago estate was ordered evacuated.
Irma was set to hit the US two weeks after Hurricane Harvey, a category four storm, struck Texas, killing about 60 people and causing property damage estimated at up to US$180 billion (RM755 billion) in Texas and Louisiana. Officials were preparing a massive response, the head of Fema said.
About nine million people in Florida might lose power, some for weeks, said Florida Power & Light Co, which serves almost half of the state’s 20.6 million residents. Amid the exodus, nearly one-third of all gas stations in Florida’s metropolitan areas were out of gasoline, with scattered outages in Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, according to Gasbuddy.com, a retail fuel price tracking service.
Mandatory evacuations on Georgia’s Atlantic coast and some of South Carolina’s barrier islands were due to begin yesterday. Virginia and Alabama were under states of emergency.
The governors of North and South Carolina warned residents to remain on guard even as the storm took a more westward track, saying their states could experience severe weather, including heavy rain and flash flooding.
As it roared in from the east, Irma ravaged small islands in the northeastern Caribbean, including Barbuda, St Martin and the British and US Virgin Islands, flattening homes and hospitals and ripping down trees.
But even as they came to grips with the destruction, residents of the islands faced the threat of another major storm, Hurricane Jose.
Jose, expected to reach the northeastern Caribbean yesterday, is an extremely dangerous storm nearing category five status, with winds of up to 240kph, the NHC said.
Katia was downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm yesterday after it made landfall near the working-class beach resort of Tecolutla in the state of Veracruz on the Mexican Gulf coast, the NHC said.
French state-owned reinsurer Caisse Centrale de Reassurance (CCR) said yesterday that Irma had caused an estimated €1.2 billion (RM6.1 billion) worth of damage in the Caribbean territories of St Martin and St Barts.
“This amount covers damages to homes, vehicles and businesses” insured for natural disasters, CCR said. Agencies