Governor: Damage less than predicted

MIAMI: Hurricane Irma was supposed to be a monster storm, immense and record-breaking in size as it charged toward Florida packing a punch that could lay waste to a state that is home to some 20 million people.

But as the sun rose on Monday, floodwaters in Florida quickly receded, and torn-off roofs, tree-damaged homes and toppled boats were limited to isolated pockets of the state.

Hurricane Irma is blamed for killing at least 40 people across the Caribbean. Just two deaths in Florida were reported by state officials on Monday.

“I didn’t see the damage I thought I would see,” Florida Governor Rick Scott said after an aerial tour of the island chain of the Keys, which were hit by the Category Four storm on Saturday.

One of the most alarming warnings had to do with storm surge – a wall of water that rushes over land during a hurricane and often kills far more people than the wind.

In the end, the surge was “not as bad as we thought”, Scott added.

Part of the reason Florida escaped the worst had to do with the path of the storm, meteorologists said.

Hurricane Irma razed the Northern coast of Cuba as a potent Category Five storm on its way toward Florida, losing some of its strength in the process.

Its westward shift, away from Miami, also spared the coastal tourist haven from its fearsome rightfront quadrant, packing the highest winds and surge potential.

“The storm surge flooding in Miami is a mere fraction of what would have happened if the core of the storm had been further east,” tweeted Rick Knabb, former director of the National Hurricane Center and currently an expert on the Weather Channel.

With weather forecasters warning of the impact a full week in advance, many people took time to shutter their windows and take to highways in search of safer ground.

Five and six days out, Irma looked set to charge up the east coast of Florida and in the last day or two, suddenly the Gulf Coast was bracing for the worst.

This uncertainty was unsurprising from a meteorological standpoint, said Irwin Redlener, director of the US National Center for Disaster Preparedness and professor at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

“We are way better than we used to be but we are nowhere near where we could be,” he said.

Florida somehow managed to evacuate six million people from the vulnerable coasts, an exodus far greater than any other storm in recent memory.

“The evacuation also went more smoothly than I thought it was going to go,” Redlener added.