Irma slams into Florida keys
Residents told to ‘protect your life’ as 210kph winds hit islands
MIAMI: Hurricane Irma’s eye-wall slammed into the lower Florida Keys, lashing the island chain with fearsome wind gusts, the US National Hurricane Center said.
The eye of the Category Four storm was 24km southeast of Key West as of 7am local time yesterday, bringing maximum sustained winds of 210kph and threatening dangerous storm surges.
“This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation!” the National Weather Service in Key West had warned, urging those who had not heeded dire warnings to take shelter “now to protect your life”.
The hurricane was moving 13kph northwest, with Florida’s west coast cities of Naples, Fort Myers and the densely populated peninsulas of Tampa Bay in its cross-hairs.
Irma was upgraded to a Category Four storm hours earlier as more than six million Floridians had been ordered to evacuate their homes ahead of the monster storm.
In Key West, police had opened a “shelter of last resort” for those who had ignored mandatory evacuation orders.
“It’s going to be horrible,” Florida Governor Rick Scott said of Irma on NBC television yesterday morning.
“Now we have to hunker down and watch out for each other.”
More than 430,000 homes and businesses were without power across the state, mainly in southern Florida, according to utility company Florida Power and Light.
The storm was expected to move along or near Florida’s southwest Gulf coast yesterday and today. But Irma is so wide that authorities are bracing for destructive storm surges on both coasts of Florida and the Keys.
At press time, three people in Florida, including a sheriff ’s deputy, have been killed in car crashes as Irma closed in.
Deputy Julie Bridges, 42, died in a head-on collision in Hardee County, east of Sarasota, early yesterday, Sheriff Arnold Lanier said.
“She had been working in a shelter and ran home to get supplies” when the crash occurred at 6.45am, he said.
The roads were “wet and windy”, he added, noting that Bridges was the mother of a young son and had worked for the sheriff ’s department for 13 years.
The other driver, a corrections officer on his way to work in a private vehicle, was also killed, Lanier said.
The third fatality was a man who died on Saturday near Key West when his truck slammed into a tree, the Monroe County Sheriff ’s Office said in a statement.