‘I hope everyone survived’
Navy sends aircraft carrier to the hurricane-battered Keys as a weakened but dangerous Irma marches on to Georgia
Authorities sent an aircraft carrier and other Navy ships to help with search-andrescue operations in Florida on Monday as a flyover of the hurricane-battered Keys yielded what the governor said were scenes of devastation.
“I just hope everyone survived,” Gov. Rick Scott said.
He said boats were cast ashore, water, sewers and electricity were knocked out, and “I don’t think I saw one trailer park where almost everything wasn’t overturned.” Authorities also struggled to clear the single highway connecting the string of islands to the mainland.
Five deaths in Florida were blamed on Irma, along with two in Georgia. At least 34 people were killed in the Caribbean as the storm closed in on the U.S. mainland.
The Keys felt Irma’s full fury when it came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane Sunday morning with 130 mph (209 kph) winds. How many people defied evacuation orders and stayed during the storm was unclear.
Statewide, more than 6.7 million homes and businesses remained without power, and officials warned it could take weeks for electricity to be restored to everyone. More than 180,000 people huddled in shelters.
The scale of the damage inflicted by Irma began to come into focus as the hurricane weakened to a tropical storm and finally pushed its way out of Florida, but not before dealing a parting shot by triggering severe flooding around Jacksonville in the state’s northeastern corner.
Around midday Monday, Irma also spread misery into Georgia and South Carolina as it moved inland with winds at 50 mph, causing some flooding and power outages.
During its rainy, windy run up the full 400mile length of Florida, Irma swamped homes, uprooted trees, flooded streets, snapped miles of power lines and toppled construction cranes.
“How are we going to survive from here?” asked Gwen Bush, who waded through thighdeep floodwaters outside her central Florida home to reach National Guard rescuers and get a ride to a shelter. “What’s going to happen now? I just don’t know.”
Around the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, where Irma rolled through early Monday, damage appeared modest. And the governor said damage on the southwest coast, including in Naples and Fort Myers, was not as bad as feared. In the Keys, though, he said “there is devastation.”