Irma batters Bahamas, Cuba
Hurricane Irma menaced Cuba and the Bahamas yesterday as it drove toward Florida after lashing the Caribbean with devastatingly high winds, killing 19 people and leaving catastrophic destruction in its wake.
As Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms in a century, bore down on Florida, Governor Rick Scott issued a stark warning to residents to get out if they were in evacuation zones.
"We are running out of time. If you are in an evacuation zone, you need to go now. This is a catastrophic storm like our state has never seen," Scott told reporters, adding the storm's effects would be felt from coast to coast.
He warned that all of the state's 20 million inhabitants should be prepared to evacuate as Irma bears down for a direct hit on the southern US state.
Irma was about 435 km east of Caibarien on Cuba's central-north coast, and 655 km southeast of Miami, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in an advisory at 11 am EDT (1500 GMT) yesterday. Hurricane conditions were spreading westward over parts of Cuba and the central Bahamas.
Irma pummeled the Turks and Caicos Islands after saturating the northern edges of the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The "extremely dangerous" storm was downgraded from a Category 5, the top of the scale of hurricane intensity, to a Category 4 early yesterday but it was still carrying winds as strong as 150 miles per hour (240 km per hour), the NHC said.
Irma was forecast to bring dangerous storm surges of up to 20 feet (6 meters) to the southeastern and central Bahamas, and up to 10 feet (3 meters) on parts of Cuba's northern coast. The storm was predicted to slam southern Florida tomorrow.
Cuba, where the Communist government has traditionally made rigorous preparations when the island is threatened by storms, was at a near standstill as Irma began to drive up the northern coast from east to west offshore.
Schools and most businesses were closed, hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated, and train, bus and domestic air services around the island were canceled. Airports were closing to international flights as conditions warranted.
The storm comes two weeks after Hurricane Harvey struck Texas, claiming around 60 lives and causing property damage estimated at as much as $180 billion in Texas and Louisiana.
As it roared in from the east, Irma ravaged a series of small islands in the northeast Caribbean, including Barbuda, the French-Dutch island of St Martin and the British and US Virgin Islands, flattening homes and hospitals and ripping down trees.
Even as they came to grips with the massive destruction, residents of the islands hit hardest by Irma faced the threat of another major storm, Hurricane Jose.
Jose, expected to reach the northeastern Caribbean on Saturday, was an extremely dangerous Category 4 storm, with winds of up to 150 mph (240 kph), the NHC said on Friday.
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