Floridians return to storm-shattered homes as Irma arrives in Georgia

     * 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

'Pray for us': Millions hunker down as deadly Irma slams into Florida

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

Hurricane Matthew closes in on Florida as death toll hits 265

ORLANDO/MIAMI - Matthew, the first major hurricane threatening a direct hit on the United States in more than 10 years, blasted the Bahamas on Thursday as it headed for Florida after killing at least 265 people in the Caribbean, mostly in Haiti.

Carrying extremely dangerous winds of 140 mph (220 kph), the storm pounded the northwestern part of the Bahamas en route to Florida's Atlantic coast, the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

Matthew's sustained winds later dropped to 130 mph, but it was likely to remain a Category 4 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity as it closed in on the United States, where it could either take direct aim at Florida or tear along the state's coast through Friday night, the Miami-based center said.

Few storms with winds as powerful as Matthew's have struck Florida, and the NHC warned of "potentially disastrous impacts."

The US National Weather Service said the storm could be the most powerful to strike northeast Florida in 118 years.

Hurricane conditions were expected in parts of Florida late on Thursday and a dangerous storm surge is expected to reach up to 11 feet (3.35 meters) along the Florida coast, Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the Miami-based NHC, said on CNN.

"What we know is that most of the lives lost in hurricanes is due to storm surge," he said.

Some 261 people were killed in Haiti, local officials said, and thousands were displaced after the storm flattened homes, uprooted trees and inundated neighborhoods earlier in the week. Four people were killed in the Dominican Republic, which neighbors Haiti.

As the storm passed near the Bahamas capital of Nassau, howling gusts of wind brought down palms and other trees and ripped shingles off the rooftops of many houses. The eye of the storm was located over the western end of Grand Bahama Island on Thursday evening.

It was too soon to predict where Matthew might do the most of its damage in the United States, but the NHC's hurricane warning extended up the Atlantic coast from southern Florida through Georgia and into South Carolina. More than 12 million people in the United States were under hurricane watches and warnings, according to the Weather Channel.

The last major hurricane, classified as a storm bearing sustained winds of more than 110 mph (177 kph), to make landfall on U.S. shores was Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

Jeff Masters, a veteran hurricane expert, said on his Weather Underground website (www.wunderground.com) that Matthew's wind threat was especially serious at Cape Canaveral, which juts into the Atlantic off central Florida.

"If Matthew does make landfall along the Florida coast, this would be the most likely spot for it. Billions of dollars of facilities and equipment are at risk at Kennedy Space Center and nearby bases, which have never before experienced a major hurricane," Masters wrote.

NASA and the US Air Force, which operate the nation's primary space launch site at Cape Canaveral, have already taken steps to safeguard personnel and equipment.

A team of 116 employees were bunkered down inside Kennedy Space Center's Launch Control Center to ride out the hurricane.

"We've had some close calls, but as far as I know it's the first time we've had the threat of a direct hit," NASA spokesman George Diller said by email from the hurricane bunker.

"AS SERIOUS AS IT GETS"

Roads in Florida, Georgia and North and South Carolina were jammed, and gas stations and food stores ran out of supplies as the storm approached early on Thursday.

Florida Governor Rick Scott warned there could be "catastrophic" damage if Matthew slammed directly into the state and urged some 1.5 million people there to evacuate.

"If you're reluctant to evacuate, just think about all the people... already killed," Scott said at a news conference. "Time is running out. This is clearly either going to have a direct hit or come right along the coast."

Scott, who activated several thousand National Guard troops to help deal with the storm, warned that millions of people were likely to be left without power.

Florida, Georgia and South Carolina opened shelters for evacuees. As of Thursday morning, more than 3,000 people were being housed in 60 shelters in Florida, Scott said.

Those three states as well as North Carolina declared states of emergency, empowering their governors to mobilize the National Guard.

President Barack Obama called the governors of the four states on Thursday to discuss preparations for the storm. He declared a state of emergency in Florida and South Carolina, a move that authorized federal agencies to coordinate disaster relief efforts.

"Hurricane Matthew is as serious as it gets. Listen to local officials, prepare, take care of each other," Obama warned people in the path of the storm in a posting on Twitter.

Hundreds of passenger flights were canceled in south Florida, and cancellations were expected to spread north in coming days along the storm's path, airlines including American Airlines, Delta Airlines and United Airlines said.

At 8 p.m. EDT (midnight GMT), Matthew was about 75 miles (120 km) east of Florida's West Palm Beach, the hurricane center said. It was heading northwest at about 13 mph (20 kph) and was expected to continue on this track through Thursday and early Friday.

On Tuesday and Wednesday Matthew, the strongest hurricane in the Caribbean since Felix struck Central America in 2007, whipped Cuba and Haiti with 140 mph (225 kph) winds and torrential rain, pummeling towns and destroying livestock, crops and homes.

In Florida, fuel stations on Thursday posted "out of gas" signs after cars waited in long lines to fill up. At a Subco gas station in Orlando, the pumps ran dry on Wednesday afternoon.

The shop was a stopping point for coastal residents seeking shelter inland. Among them was Jonas Sylvan, 44, of Melbourne, Florida, who planned to hole up in a hotel with his wife, two daughters and dog. "We're just trying to get away from the coast," he said. "It's safer here."

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com