Hurricane Irma menaces Bahamas and Cuba, on course toward Florida

September 9, 2017 - 12:06 AM
4878
Aftermath of Hurricane Irma Carribean
View of the aftermath of Hurricane Irma on Sint Maarten Dutch part of Saint Martin island in the Carribean September 7, 2017. Netherlands Ministry of Defence- Gerben van Es/Handout via REUTERS

HAVANA – Hurricane Irma menaced Cuba and the Bahamas on Friday as it drove toward Florida after lashing the Caribbean with devastating winds and torrential rain, killing 19 people and leaving a swathe of catastrophic destruction.

Florida Governor Rick Scott issued a stark warning to residents to get out if they were in evacuation zones. Irma is one of the most powerful Atlantic storms in a century.

“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.

Early on Friday, Irma was about 80 miles (125 km) northeast of Cuba’s northeastern coast and 450 miles (725 km) southeast of Miami. It 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 Friday but it was still carrying winds as strong as 150 miles per hour (240 km per hour), the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in an advisory at 8 a.m EDT (8 p.m. PH time, or 1200 GMT).

Irma hit the southeastern Bahamas on Friday, where it was forecast to bring storm surges as high as 20 feet (six meters) before brushing Cuba’s central northern coast and then slamming into southern Florida on Sunday.

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.