Hurricane Irma: Florida Keys facing potential ‘humanitarian crisis’

Six deaths in Florida have been blamed on Irma, along with three in Georgia and one in SC.

Governments in Britain, France and the Netherlands, which oversee Caribbean territories hit by Irma, have come under criticism for an ill-prepared and slow response to the historic storm.

Florida residents who spent an anxious night huddled indoors were venturing out Monday to survey the damage, which did not seem to be as bad as initially feared.

Irma was a post-tropical cyclone with top winds of only 10 miles per hour as of 11 a.m. ET – a far cry from the Category 4 storm that ravaged the Florida Keys on Sunday.

“There’s devastation”, Scott said after flying over the Keys with the Coast Guard.

“I have to show up where I hope someone will be, then write it down on paper and use that old standby word of mouth to get the information out”. “Again, we’ve never seen anything like this”. “The biggest thing we’ve got to do for people is get their power back”. But homes that were made from concrete appeared to have withstood the gusts.

But because of disrupted phone service and other damage, the full extent of the destruction was still a question mark, more than two days after Irma roared into the Keys with 130 miles per hour (209 kph) winds.

Jacksonville, Florida – the largest city by area in the contiguous United States – is still trying to recover from record-breaking storm surge and flooding on Monday.

The President, who has been meeting with Cabinet members at Camp David this weekend, spoke by phone Sunday morning with the governors of Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, Sanders said. Irma made landfall Sunday in the Keys before making a second landfall in Southwest Florida. And even though residents probably didn’t have finals to worry about, that didn’t stop some people from going out and experiencing the fierce winds and rains Irma brought to Florida. Irma has been linked to 10 deaths in the United States.

It swamped homes, uprooted massive trees, flooded streets, cast boats ashore, snapped power lines and toppled construction cranes.

Mayor Carlos Gimenez expressed relief that the damage wasn’t worse.

“We need to take this seriously”, he said. It also shattered the climate-controlled bubbles that enable people to live here despite the state’s heat, humidity and insects.

Other areas of Florida – such as Seminole, west of Tampa – aren’t likely to get power turned back on until “midnight September 17”, Duke Energy said.

In Bonita Springs, Fla., floodwaters reached waist deep in some areas, flooding homes and cars. When the lights go out in Florida, the muggy, buggy reality can be jarring even to longtime residents.

“I know the winds are going to be very devastating and life threatening”. On Tuesday morning, though, residents of the upper Keys, including Key Largo, Tavernier and Islamorada, were being allowed to drive home.

FPL said on Wednesday it had provided power to some parts of a nursing home where people died after the facility lost electricity during Irma and that the home was not on a list “critical facilities” prioritized for emergency power restoration.

“She got us back”, Johnson said.

“At first it’s like, ‘We’re safe, thank God.’ Now they’re testy”, he said. “We have debris all over the state”.

Irma was a Category 5 hurricane when it made landfall last week in Barbuda, St. Barts St. Martin, Anguilla, the USA and British Virgin Islands and Cuba. On Monday, roughly half the stations in Jacksonville, Tampa, West Palm Beach and Fort Myers were empty.

A plane with 278 aboard landed in Paris, while another 100 people flew into Eindhoven in the southern Netherlands from the Guadeloupe capital Pointe-a-Pitre.

Harbin, a Monroe County Sheriff’s deputy assigned to the check point in Florida City, said it’s hard to tell people they can’t go home yet. Authorities were set to begin house-to-house searches Monday to check on survivors.