Florida braces for a battering
MORE THAN SIX MILLION ORDERED TO EVACUATE Cities of Naples, Fort Myers and peninsula of Tampa Bay in storm’s crosshairs.
Hurricane Irma regained strength yesterday as it began pummelling Florida, lashing its southern island chain with hurricane-force wind gusts and threatening landfall within hours.
Irma, packing winds of 210 kilometres per hour, was upgraded to a Category 4 storm as it closed in on the Florida Keys, the US National Hurricane Centre said, as more than six million Floridians – a third of the state’s population – had been ordered to evacuate their homes ahead of the monster storm.
Hurricane-force gusts began whirling into the Keys as the storm churned about 65 kilometres south-southeast of Key West at 5am.
“Everyone in the Florida Keys... it is time to hunker down,” the National Weather Service (NWS) tweeted.
“The worst winds are yet to come.”
For those people still at home, it was too late to escape the wrath of what could be the worst hurricane in storm-prone Florida, where nearly 300 000 power outages had already been reported.
In Key West, police had opened a “shelter of last resort” for those who had ignored mandatory evacuation orders.
The cities of Naples, Fort Myers and the densely populated peninsulas of Tampa Bay were in the crosshairs of the storm, which threatened surges of up to 4.5 metres – enough to cover a house.
“Life threatening storm surge is occurring now in the Keys and is expected to begin this morning in southwest Florida,” warned Florida Governor Rick Scott in a tweet yesterday.
The NWS urged Floridians to wear suitable footwear and take shelter in lower floor interior rooms – far from windows – and use items like helmets, mattresses, pillows and blankets for protection.
At North Collier Regional Park, a shelter just outside Naples, anxious evacuees prayed they and their loved ones would remain safe when the storm made landfall.
Viviana Sierra, a Naples resident who was accompanied by her dog, parents and brother, was sanguine about the prospect of eventually going back to find her home and belongings destroyed.
“You can replace material things but your life is very important so I think it’s better that we stay here,” she said.
The storm was expected to move along or near Florida’s southwest Gulf coast today.
But Irma is so wide that authorities were bracing for destructive storm surges on both coasts of Florida and the Keys. – AFP