Deadly storm:
• Hurricane devastates islands and leaves at least eight people dead
An aerial photograph shows the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, on the Franco-Dutch island of Sint Maarten, where 10 people have been killed. The hurricane produced sustained winds of 295km/h, France’s weather service said on Thursday.
Irma barrelled towards Florida after battering Puerto Rico and devastating a chain of small Caribbean islands, as the category 5 hurricane threatens to turn into the most expensive storm in US history.
Irma, one of three hurricanes churning towards North America, is forecast to hit Florida by Sunday afternoon, a prospect that has roiled markets for everything from orange juice to insurance and natural gas.
A mandatory evacuation order has been issued for areas including downtown Miami and Miami Beach. Barclays has estimated insured losses in a worstcase scenario at $130bn.
“The threat of direct hurricane impacts in Florida over the weekend and early next week continues to increase,” the US National Hurricane Centre said in an advisory.
The centre of the storm was expected to hit the Turks and Caicos and southeastern Bahamas on Thursday evening, bringing “life-threatening” storm surges and “large and destructive waves”.
Hurricane Jose was just behind Irma in the Atlantic, also forecast to move north of Puerto Rico. In the Gulf of Mexico, a third hurricane, Katia, threatened to come ashore in Mexico.
Reinsurance companies could take a big hit as primary insurers have reduced exposure to Florida in recent years.
Volatility in stocks across the sector will probably continue until the storm’s damage becomes more certain.
The system may knock out power to almost 2-million people, curb natural gas demand in one of the largest US markets and threaten $1.2bn worth of crops in Florida — the top US grower of tomatoes, oranges, green beans, cucumbers, squash and sugar cane.
The storm damaged or destroyed as much as 95% of homes on the island of Barbuda, crippled its airport runway and broke a cellular tower in two, complicating relief efforts, Prime Minister Gaston Browne said on national television. “It is absolutely heart-wrenching.”
“Anguilla received the hurricane’s full blast” and the British Virgin Islands were also hit, UK Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan told the British parliament on Thursday.
“Our initial assessment is of severe damage and we expect that the islands will need extensive humanitarian assistance, which we will, of course, provide,” he said.
There was massive damage on the two French West Indies islands, with eight people dead, French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said at a media conference in Paris on Thursday. Associated Press said the total death toll had risen to 10.
In the US, mandatory evacuations were issued for the Florida Keys and governor Rick Scott said he expected additional evacuation orders.
President Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday that he was “watching hurricane closely” and his team was already in the state. In addition to MiamiDade’s mandatory evacuations, Broward and Collier counties issued voluntary evacuation orders for some areas. Irma comes less than two weeks after Hurricane Harvey smashed ashore in Texas, knocking offline almost a quarter of US oil-refining capacity and causing widespread power outages and flooding. Current models show Irma veering away from gas and oil platforms off the coast of Texas and Louisiana, sparing Houston more devastation.
Irma’s top winds slightly weakened to 290km/h from 297km/h, but the storm remained at category 5 strength, the highest measure on the fivestep Saffir Simpson scale.
A direct strike on Miami at category 4 strength could lead to insured losses of $125bn to $130bn, Jay Gelb, an analyst at Barclays, wrote in a note this week. Uninsured losses would add to that.
Insured and uninsured losses from Katrina reached $160bn in 2017 after it slammed into New Orleans in 2005.
Only three category 5 hurricanes have hit the contiguous 48 US states, according to Weather Underground: the Labour Day Hurricane of 1935 that devastated the Florida Keys, Hurricane Camille in 1969 and Hurricane Andrew that cut across Florida in 1992.