Deadly hurricane batters Florida
HURRICANE Irma bore down on southern Florida yesterday with 210km/h winds, flooding Miami streets and knocking out power to more than 1.6 million homes and businesses.
Even before it came ashore, Florida was feeling Irma’s fury with at least one man killed, a woman forced to deliver her own baby and trees and tower blocks swaying in high winds.
The storm was one of the most powerful ever seen in the Atlantic and has already killed two dozen people in the Caribbean and lashed Cuba with 11m waves yesterday.
Some 6.5 million people, about a third of the state’s population, had been ordered to evacuate southern Florida. Officials warned that Irma’s heavy storm surge – seawater driven onto land by high winds – could bring floods of up to 4.6m along the state’s western Gulf Coast.
It submerged the highway that connects the isolated Florida Keys archipelago with the mainland and small white-capped waves could be seen in flooded streets between Miami office towers.
Irma is expected to cause billions of dollars in damage to the third-most populous US state, a major tourism hub with an economy comprising about 5% of US gross domestic product.
At least 1.6 million Florida homes and businesses had lost power, according to Florida Power & Light and other utilities.
The count of people killed by the storm in the Caribbean rose to 24 yesterday with two new deaths reported on the Dutch portion of Saint Martin.
Irma has already claimed at least three lives in Florida.
Deme Lomas, who owns Miami restaurant Niu Kitchen, said he saw a construction crane torn apart and dangling from the top of a building.
“We couldn’t hear it come down because of the wind, but when we just took a look it was pulled apart into a mess,” Lomas said in a phone interview from his 35th-floor apartment.
“We feel the building swaying all the time. It’s like being on a ship.”
Miami streets were flooded as the water crept up on and around Brickell Avenue, which runs 168m from the waterfront through the city’s financial district and newly built high rises.
South Florida’s large population of elderly residents posed a severe test for the emergency shelters, many of which were not equipped for people with elaborate medical needs.
Irma is now a Category 4 storm, the second-highest designation on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
A woman in Miami’s Little Haiti neighbourhood delivered her own baby, with medical personnel telling her what to do on the phone, because emergency staff could not reach her in time, the city of Miami said. The two were later taken to hospital.
Irma comes just days after Hurricane Harvey dumped record-setting rain in Texas, causing unprecedented flooding, killing at least 60 people and leaving an estimated $180-billion (R2.3-trillion) in damage in its wake.
Puerto Rico, hit by the storm last week, has been declared a disaster area.