Floridians return to storm-battered homes

Storm entered Florida on its west coastFlorida’s southern tip and west coast appear to have been most severely impacted, as the hurricane took a late westerly turn from the Caribbean as it finally headed north. And we are talking about that and something with the keys.

Some Florida utilities, including FPL, had warned customers it could take weeks to restore power in the hardest hit areas.

Britain’s response to Irma has been criticised by some local inhabitants as too slow with some complaining about a breakdown of law and order and being left to fend for themselves. More than 894,000 Georgia Power and Electric Membership Corp. customers were in the dark Tuesday afternoon.

Irma sustained its 185-mph winds for 37 hours – “the longest any cyclone around the globe has maintained that intensity on record”, according to Phil Klotzbach, a research scientist at Colorado State University.

Irma was ranked a category five, the rare top end of the scale of hurricane intensity, for days, and carried maximum sustained winds of up to 295km/h when it crashed into the island of Barbuda on Wednesday.

“Stay off the roads, stay off the streets, let us complete our assessment, clear the roads of water, power lines, trees and then you can get out there and determine what happened to your individual property or your neighborhood”, said Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler. He said sustained winds have reached 45 miles per hour (72 kph) and gusts over 60 miles per hour (96 kph) in the coastal area causing a number of knocked down tree and powerlines.

Massive cleanup: Trees are down and streets are flooded, even though the storm surge wasn’t as bad as officials had feared.

Several major airports in Florida that halted passenger operations due to Irma began limited service today, including Miami International, one of the busiest airports in the US.

– Two tornadoes touched down in Brevard County, Florida, destroying mobile homes in their path, officials said.

While some coastal communities breathed a sigh of relief, people in Jacksonville faced flash flooding Monday.

The storm engulfed almost the entire Florida peninsula, wreaking havoc from the state’s southernmost point up to the Georgia line, from the Atlantic coast to the Gulf side.

Rescues are underway just south of Jacksonville. Thousands of homes in Florida were reported to have power outage.

Meanwhile, all scheduled votes are cancelled for Congress on Monday. The airline is uncertain when it would resume service throughout the state. The storm gradually lost strength, weakening to a Category 1 hurricane by Monday morning. A woman was killed when a downed tree struck her vehicle in Cumming, north of Atlanta.

The post noted that Tropical Storm Irma is expected to weaken as it moves along the northwestern coast of Florida.

The Cuban government reported on Monday that 10 people had been killed after Irma battered the island’s north coast with ferocious winds and 36-foot (11-m) waves over the weekend.

Winds, rain and storm surge slammed the SC coastal city, with gusts up to 50 to 60 miles per hour. Charleston police asked residents to avoid downtown in anticipation of high tide.

Surge flooding water levels from the St. Johns River, under the Main Street Bridge, hit a record-high of 5.57 feet, the NWS reported.