Monster storm hits Caribbean
Florida residents — including these putting yard furniture in their pool to keep it from being tossed around by the storm’s powerful winds — prepare for enormous Hurricane Irma, which started raking Caribbean Sea islands Wednesday morning.
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Hurricane-force winds from Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms ever recorded, started to pummel the first Caribbean islands in its path early Wednesday as the mammoth Category 5 hurricane took aim at Puerto Rico and other islands.
Wind gusts around 50 mph arrived in Antigua and Barbuda late Tuesday but picked up significant strength as the center of the storm swirled several dozen miles offshore. The authorities cut off power on those islands before midnight, forcing residents to listen to the latest forecasts on transistor radios in the darkness.
Residents throughout the Caribbean on Tuesday scrambled to rush out of flood zones, stock up on the last available water, food and gas, shutter their homes and brace for the storm. On Antigua, many residents were spending the night in nearly 40 shelters set up before the storm because of concerns that their homes, even when boarded up, would topple in the destructive winds.
“We have to prepare for an event that we have never experienced here,” Gov. Ricardo Rosselló of Puerto Rico said at a news conference earlier Tuesday, calling the hurricane’s arrival imminent and its potential catastrophic.
Packing winds of up to 185 mph, Irma threatened havoc and widespread destruction across Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory of 3.4 million people, the nearby island of Hispaniola (home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Antigua, St. Kitts and Nevis, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, among others. Cuba was also threatened. The storm was expected to rake or sideswipe Puerto Rico on Wednesday.
President Trump declared a state of emergency in Puerto Rico, Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands on Tuesday.
Hurricane Irma is one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean, according to the National Hurricane Center and Bryan Norcross, the hurricane specialist at the Weather Channel. The hurricane center said Irma had winds of up to 185 mph as it approached the Leeward Islands. There have been other storms with comparable winds in the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico, where the warm waters fuel particularly dangerous hurricanes.
With Harvey’s destruction still fresh on people’s minds, Florida hustled into action. Gov. Rick Scott activated the state National Guard to help with hurricane preparations and suspended tolls. The governor declared a state of emergency on Monday and spoke with Trump, who offered “the full resources of the federal government,” Scott wrote on Twitter.
Most of the latest projections have Irma slamming into the state by Sunday, although it is unclear where it may make landfall.
But Puerto Rico and the nearby northern Leeward islands are expected to face Irma’s potentially catastrophic winds first. It has been nearly a century since Puerto Rico was hit by a Category 5 storm, Norcross said.
Puerto Rican officials have warned that the island’s fragile electrical grid could be shut down for days, weeks or even months in some areas.