* Irma downgraded to tropical storm as it heads northwest
* About 7.3 million in Florida, other states without power
* 39 killed in Caribbean, one in U.S.
FLORIDA CITY/MARCO ISLAND, Florida - Storm-shocked Floridians returned to their shattered homes on Monday as the remnants of once-powerful Hurricane Irma pushed inland, leaving well over half of residents without power and flooding cities in the state's northeastern corner.
Downgraded to a tropical storm early on Monday, Irma once ranked as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record days before barreling into the Florida Keys on Sunday and plowing northward along the Gulf Coast to wreak havoc across a wide swath of the state.
Especially hard hit was the resort archipelago of the Keys, extending into the Gulf of Mexico from the tip of Florida's peninsula and connected to the mainland by a single, narrow highway, Governor Rick Scott told a news conference on Monday.
"There's devastation," he said, adding that virtually every mobile-home park on the island chain was left upended. "It's horrible what we saw."
In Miami, which escaped the worst of Irma's winds but experienced heavy flooding, residents in the city's Little Haiti neighborhood returned to the wreckage of trailer homes that were shredded by the storm.
"I wanted to cry, but this is what it is, this is life," Melida
Hernandez, 67, who had ridden out the storm at a nearby church, said as
she gazed at the ruins of her dwelling, split in two by a fallen tree.
Flooding was reported on Monday in northeastern Florida, including
Jacksonville, where police were rescuing residents from waist-deep
water.
"Stay inside. Go up. Not out," Jacksonville's website warned
residents. "There is flooding throughout the city." The city also warned
residents to be wary of snakes and alligators driven into the
floodwaters.
EVACUEES URGED TO STAY PUT
Still, the scope of Florida's damage paled in comparison with the utter devastation left by Irma as a rare Category 5 hurricane in parts of the Caribbean, where the storm killed nearly 40 people - at least 10 of them in Cuba - before turning its fury on Florida.
The storm claimed its first known U.S. fatality over the weekend in the Keys - a man found dead in a pickup truck that had crashed into a tree in high winds, but there was no immediate word on further casualties.
The Keys were largely evacuated before the storm hit, and police established a checkpoint on Monday to keep residents from returning while authorities work to restore power, water, fuel supplies and medical service.
No timetable for reopening the Keys was given, but Miami-Dade County police detective Alvaro Zabeleta, speaking for local authorities, said the message for evacuees was: "Today, for sure, it's not happening."
Some 6.5 million people, about one-third of Florida's population, had been ordered from their homes ahead of Irma's arrival, and more than 200,000 people sought refuge in about 700 shelters, according to state data.
Scott urged evacuees all over the state to stay put for now rather than rush home, saying downed power lines, debris and other hazards abounded. "Don't put any more lives at risk," he said.
He noted, however, that damage to Florida's west coast, which bore the brunt of the storm after Irma left the Keys, was less severe than had been feared.
WITHOUT POWER
One of the biggest lingering problems was widespread power outages, with utilities reporting 7.3 million homes and businesses without electricity in Florida and neighboring states. They said it could take weeks to fully restore service.
Scott said 65 percent of Florida was without power.
Travel into and out of the state likewise remained stymied. Miami International Airport, one of the busiest in the country, halted passenger flights through at least Monday.
Police in Miami-Dade County said they had made 29 arrests for looting and burglary. Fort Lauderdale police said they had arrested 19 people for looting.
With sustained winds of up to 60 miles per hour (100 kph), Irma had crossed into Georgia by midday, posing a threat of torrential rains and flooding there and other states in the U.S. Southeast.
Some residents who fled the Keys before Irma roared ashore with winds up to 130 mph (209 kph) grew angry as authorities barred them from returning to their homes on Monday.
A few dozen people argued with police who turned them away from the first of a series of bridges leading to the island chain.
"I would expect that the Keys are not fit for re-entry for regular citizenry for weeks," Tom Bossert, a homeland security advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, told a White House news briefing.
BILLIONS IN DAMAGE
Irma's arrival in Florida came about two weeks after Hurricane Harvey claimed about 60 lives and caused property damage estimates as high as $180 billion after pummeling the Gulf Coasts of Texas and Louisiana with heavy rains and severe flooding.
Insured property losses in Florida from Irma are expected to run from $20 billion to $40 billion, catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide estimated.
That tally, lower than earlier forecasts of up to $50 billion in insured losses, helped spur a relief rally on Wall Street as fears eased that Irma would cut into U.S. economic growth.
As shelters began to empty on Monday, some 7,000 people filed out of Germain Arena in Estero, south of Fort Myers. The crowd included Don Sciarretta, who rode out the storm with his 90-year-old friend, Elsie Johnston, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.
Sciarretta, 73, spent two days without sleep, holding up a slumped-over Johnston and making sure she did not fall out of her chair. He relied on other people in the shelter to bring the pair food, often after waiting in hours-long lines.
"For the next storm, I'll go somewhere on my own like a hotel or a friend's house," Sciarretta said. "I'm not going through this again."
(Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta in Orlando, Fla., Bernie Woodall, Ben Gruber and Zachary Fagenson in Miami, Letitia Stein in Detroit, Colleen Jenkins in Winston-Salem, N.C., Doina Chiacu and Jeff Mason in Washington, Scott DiSavino in New York and Marc Frank in Havana; Writing by Scott Malone and Steve Gorman; Editing by Paul Simao and Peter Cooney)
source: news.abs-cbn.com
More than 1.4 million homes and businesses in south Florida were without power from Hurricane Irma on Sunday, the state's largest utility said, and repairs to its system will take weeks, threatening to leave millions in the dark.
Much of the state has not yet felt the full brunt of the storm as Irma barreled across the Florida Keys on Sunday morning and headed for the state's southwest coast with maximum sustained winds of 215 kilometers per hour, making it a Category 4 storm, the second worst on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
In all about 2 million people and businesses had lost power. At 11:45 a.m. EDT, about 1.4 million were without power while about 300,000 had power restored, FPL said. Large utilities that serve other parts of the state saw only seeing scattered outages.
"We will have to rebuild part of our system, particularly in the western part of the state. That restoration process will be measured in weeks, not days," said FPL spokesman Rob Gould at a news conference.
On Friday, the utility warned Irma could impact around 4.1 million customers, but that was before the storm track shifted away from the eastern side of the state where FPL's customers are concentrated in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Last October, Hurricane Matthew knocked out 1.2 million FPL customers as it skirted Florida's east coast without making landfall. Matthew did not come on shore and damage infrastructure, and it took the utility about two days to restore power.
FPL has warned customers to prepare for outages that could last weeks if Irma requires the utility to rebuild parts of its service territory.
FPL decided to shut only one of the two reactors at its Turkey Point nuclear plant on Saturday because the storm track shifted, and plans to leave both reactors at the St. Lucie plant in service because hurricane force winds are no longer expected to hit the sites. On Sunday, Gould said its nuclear plants were safe.
FPL had said on Friday it planned to shut both units at Turkey Point sometime on Saturday about 24 hours before hurricane force winds reached the plant.
St. Lucie is located on a barrier island on the state's east coast, about 120 miles (193 km) north of Miami, while Turkey Point is about 30 miles south of Miami.
FPL is a unit of Florida energy company NextEra Energy Inc.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MIAMI/FORT MYERS, Florida -- Millions of people huddled in shelters or battened-down homes in Florida on Sunday morning as Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Atlantic, hit the state with 210-kph winds.
The National Hurricane Center forecast potentially deadly storm surges -- water driven ashore by the winds -- of up to 15 feet along some parts of the coast. As the storm made landfall on the Florida Keys archipelago off the tip of southern Florida, torrential rains and lashing winds knocked out power to nearly 800,000 homes and businesses on the mainland, according to utilities.
"Pray for us," Florida Governor Rick Scott said in an ABC News interview as his state braced for the massive storm, which has already left a trail of destruction through the Caribbean.
Irma, which prompted one of the largest evacuations in U.S. history, is expected to cause billions of dollars in damage to the third-most-populous U.S. state, a major tourism hub, with an economy comprising about 5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
Irma was a Category 4 hurricane raging in the lower Florida Keys as of 9 a.m. EDT, on a path that will take it up Florida's Gulf of Mexico coast near population centers including Tampa and St. Petersburg, the NHC reported. Forecasters also warned tornadoes could form in large portions of the state.
Irma, which killed at least 22 people as it tore through Caribbean islands toward Florida, has already claimed at least one life in the state. Emergency responders in the Florida Keys said they pulled a man's body from his pickup truck, which had crashed into a tree in high winds.
But officials say it is the water and not the winds that people should fear most.
"Storm surge has the highest potential to kill the most amount of people and to cause the most amount of damage," Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency told "Fox News Sunday."
The time to evacuate the Keys had passed, he said, "It's too late for folks in Monroe County, the Florida Keys. Maximum radius winds and the eye are moving over as we speak."
STORM BABY
One woman in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood delivered her own baby, with medical personnel coaching her on the phone because emergency responders were not able to reach her, the city of Miami said on Twitter. The two are now at the hospital, it said.
Ahead of the storm, officials in Florida had ordered a total of 6.3 million people, or about a third of the state's population, to evacuate.
But some state residents planned to ride out the storm in their homes. Midway up the state's Gulf Coast in Clearwater, Sarah Griffin said she planned to hunker down in a closet in her boarded-up concrete house.
"You've just got to have plenty of beer, Captain Morgan, vodka, (and) you'll get through," said Griffin, 52.
The NHC has put out a hurricane warning and a tropical storm warning stretching through almost all of Florida into Georgia and South Carolina, home to more than 20 million people.
Irma comes just days after Hurricane Harvey dumped record-setting rain in Texas, causing unprecedented flooding, killing at least 60 people and leaving an estimated $180 billion in property damage in its wake. Almost three months remain in the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs through November.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
FORT MYERS, Florida - Hurricane Irma turned its menacing sight toward the Florida Keys on Saturday as it completed a destructive march along Cuba's northern coast and set off an 11th hour scramble for safety by Americans who may have ignored warnings to evacuate.
Irma, one of the fiercest Atlantic storms in a century, was expected to rip through Florida's southern archipelago on Sunday morning. It will make landfall on the Florida peninsula somewhere west of Miami and then head up the state's west coast, by Tampa, forecasters said.
Irma, which has killed at least 22 people in the Caribbean, was likely to inflict billions of dollars in damage in the third largest US state by population.
On Florida's west coast, Charley Ball said he expected a storm surge to engulf the entire island of Sanibel, an affluent community where he lives and operates a painting company.
"Just left the island and said goodbye to everything I own," the 62-year-old Ball said.
The storm could bring winds in excess of 130 mph (209 kph) and a storm surge up to 15 feet (4.6 meters), which is expected to trigger flooding.
Irma, located about 115 miles (185 km) southeast of Key West on Saturday afternoon, was a Category 5 storm, the highest ranking possible, when it crashed into Cuba during the morning. It gradually weakened to a Category 3 storm as it bumped along the island's northern coastline, flooding streets and sending waves crashing over sea walls.
Maximum sustained winds stayed at around 125 mph (201 kph), the US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.
Irma is expected to regain strength as it steams over warm waters south of Florida, according to the NHC. It was likely to regain Category 4 status before striking Florida, said NHC spokesman Dennis Feltgen.
The wide reach of Irma's deadly winds and its size, more than its numerical ranking, has rattled veteran hurricane watchers. It could rival any storm in Florida's history, Governor Rick Scott said.
Irma will dump 10 inches to 20 inches (25 cm to 51 cm) of rain over Florida and southeast Georgia from Saturday through Monday, the National Weather Service said, a fraction of what Hurricane Harvey dropped on Texas and Louisiana last month.
But unlike with Harvey, dangerous winds will barely abate once Irma makes landfall on Sunday morning.
A long line of people in Estero, Florida lined up to enter an arena that officials converted into an evacuation shelter, one of hundreds that have opened up across the state.
Andrea Prather, a singer from the Gulf Coast city of Fort Myers, said she was confident that she would stay safe on the 25th floor of her high-rise building.
She closely followed reports about the storm's path as it headed toward her town.
"When it made that turn, that's when I had that anxiety pit in my stomach. I was like, 'OK this is not good,'" she said.
In Cuba, the destruction along the north central coast was similar to that seen on other Caribbean islands over the last week as Irma plowed into Ciego de Avila province.
In the storm's aftermath, people walked through ankle-deep water in Caibarien, a Cuban fishing town where streets were flooded and covered in seaweed. Elsewhere, winds toppled trees and utility polls or ripped apart roofs.
"It was powerful, water rose to about one meter high," said Risle Echemendia, 28, in Caibarien as he swept muddy water out of his front door. "This was the strongest storm Caibarien ever had. It will take a while to recover from this, at least a few years."
It was the first time the eye of a Category 5 storm had made landfall in Cuba since 1932, state media said, and the island's Communist government ordered the evacuation of more than 1 million people, with most sheltering with family and friends.
THIRD OF FLORIDA
Officials in Florida have ordered a total of 6.3 million people, or about a third of the state's population, to evacuate, creating massive traffic jams on highways and bringing huge crowds to shelters.
In Palm Beach, President Donald Trump's waterfront Mar-a-Lago estate was under evacuation order. Trump and his cabinet were at Camp David in Maryland, receiving updates on the storm.
Irma was already whipping south Florida with winds on Saturday, and the governor said thousands of people were without power.
About 9 million people in Florida may lose power, some for weeks, said Florida Power & Light Co, which serves almost half of the state's 20.6 million residents.
The window for people in evacuation zones to flee was drawing to a close on Saturday, officials said, warning that gas stations would soon be without fuel and bridges would be closed in some areas.
"You can't play chicken with this thing or try to outrun the storm," US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said at a news conference.
Rubio acknowledged some people had fled their homes only to arrive in areas expected to be in the storm's path, but he advised people in that situation to hunker down.
That was the case for Chris Cardona, 54, and his wife Laurie, who left their mobile home near Miami on Thursday to seek refuge with friends near Tampa.
"Not only did we go west, but so did Irma. She's tracking us, that feisty minx," Cardona said by phone.
Hurricane Irma could cause insurance losses of between $15 billion and $50 billion in the United States, catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide said.
Irma was set to hit the United States two weeks after Hurricane Harvey struck Texas as a Category 4 storm, killing about 60 people and causing property damage estimated at up to $180 billion in Texas and Louisiana.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
