HURRICANE IRMA RIPS INTO FLORIDA
Storm kills 28, ravages heavily populated central areas of state
TAMPA metro areas.
Florida Director of Emergency Management Bryan Koon said officials would wait until first light yesterday to begin rescue efforts and assess damage, adding he did not have yet any numbers on fatalities statewide, the Miami Herald reported.
On Sunday, Irma claimed its first United States fatality — a man found dead in a pickup truck that had crashed into a tree in high winds in the town of Marathon, in the Florida Keys.
The storm killed 28 people as it raged westward through the Caribbean en route to Florida, devastating small islands, and grazing Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti before pummelling parts of Cuba’s north coast with 11m waves.
Some 6.5 million people, about a third of the state’s population, had been ordered to evacuate southern Florida.
Many of the evacuation orders extended until at least yesterday due in part to flooding, massive power outages and downed electric lines, leaving residents unable to return to their homes to survey any damage.
TV news video of damage in Naples, a city on the Gulf coast 200km northwest of Miami, showed buildings ripped apart by hurricane winds and streets flooded by rain.
High winds snapped power lines and left four million Florida homes and businesses without power.
Five tornadoes were reported in Florida on Sunday, causing damage to structures. Along with hurricane warnings and watches in Florida, the weather service placed tropical storm warnings for large parts of Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina.
Miami apartment towers swayed in the high winds on Sunday, three construction cranes were toppled, and small white-capped waves could be seen in flooded streets between Miami office towers.
Waves poured over a Miami seawall, flooding streets waistdeep in places around Brickell Avenue, which runs a couple of blocks from the waterfront through the financial district and past foreign consulates.
In Washington, the combined economic cost of hurricanes Harvey and Irma could reach US$290 billion (RM1.2 trillion), equivalent to 1.5 per cent of the US gross domestic product, US forecaster AccuWeather said on Sunday.
“We believe the damage estimate from Irma to be about US$100 billion, among the costliest hurricanes of all time,” said the firm’s CEO and founder Joel Myers.
Harvey, which battered Texas and parts of Louisiana in late August, will be “the costliest weather disaster in US history at US$190 billion or one full percentage point of GDP”, which stands at US$19 trillion. Agencies