US rush to flee Irma
MORE than a million people in two US states have been ordered to leave their homes as killer Hurricane Irma barrels towards Florida and Georgia.
Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms in a century, has killed at least 14 people as it has smashed through a string of Caribbean islands.
With winds of around 290km/h, the storm the size of France has ravaged islands including Barbuda, Saint Martin and the British and US Virgin Islands, ripping down trees and flattening homes and hospitals.
Residents of the Turks and Caicos Islands hunkered down yesterday to take the force of Category 5 Irma, which is ex- pected to hit the US coast at the weekend.
Promising professional surfer Zander Venezia, 16, died while riding an Irma-generated swell in Barbados.
Irma is moving towards Cuba and is expected to plough into Florida as a powerful Category 4 tomorrow.
Residents boarded up homes and business as storm surges and flooding were due to begin within the next 48 hours. The race to flee Irma became a marathon nightmare as more than 500,000 people were ordered out of south Florida.
Normally quick trips turned into daylong journeys on crowded highways amid a search for petrol and accom- modation and plane seats out of Florida were in short supply.
Governor Rick Scott ordered all schools and state offices to close, while NASA secured the Kennedy Space Center.
Most of the critical buildings at Kennedy are designed to withstand gusts of up to 220km/h, but Irma’s wind could exceed that.
In Georgia, authorities ordered nearly 540,000 coastal residents to evacuate inland at the weekend.
“If there’s a freight train coming at you, then you get off the tracks,” said Jason Buelterman, mayor of Tybee Island, a beach community of more than 3000 residents east of Savannah.