Hours after barreling across the resort archipelago of the Florida Keys, the storm crept up the western shore of the Florida Peninsula to make a second landfall at Marco Island around 3.35 p.m. (1935 GMT), about a dozen miles (19 km) south of the upscale beach town of Naples on the Gulf of Mexico.
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Hurricane Irma has weakened into a still-dangerous tropical storm as it pushed inland, triggering record flooding in Florida’s north-eastern corner.
Irma hit the Florida Keys on Sunday, flooding streets, spawning tornadoes, knocking out power to more than 3 million people across the state and snapping massive construction cranes over the Miami skyline.
With Irma now lashing the state’s south-west with sustained winds of 177km/h, and threatening tornadoes and a deadly storm surge on the east coast, weather forecasters have begun to notice a serious problem in how Americans are interpreting the cone.
In the center if the city, two men were killed when the roof of a house collapsed and the body of an 89-year-old woman was found floating in water inside her house, near Havana’s iconic seaside Malecon esplanade.
The National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane and storm surge watch for parts of South Florida and the Florida Keys on Thursday.
– Georgia was already feeling the effects of the storm, with more than 17,000 customers without power in Savannah.
Ryan Stone first started streaming early on Sunday morning as rough seas and strong winds battered his boat, the Andromeda. The hashtag “Recover813” is being utilized on social media to help officials see the scale of damage caused by the storm.
More than 6.5 million people in the state are in an evacuation zone, but it is unclear how many have taken their lives in their hands and stayed put. Not everyone heeded the calls.
“We’ve never had that many outages, and I don’t think any utility in the country ever has”, FPL Chief Executive Eric Silagy said at a news conference on Monday.
“Truthfully, the whole state of Florida is in trouble.
We’re gonna ride it out”, Cone said.
“A few tornadoes are possible across northeast Florida and southeast portions of Georgia and SC through tonight”, the hurricane center said.
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport will also be closed on Monday. “Tonight, there is no doubt these officers made a difference”, the department said on Facebook.
Phuong says the crews expect to stay busy as Irma passes over the area and in the storm’s aftermath.
They said the walls of their boarded-up accommodation shook and they could hear things banging against the building outside.
An 8-10 foot storm surge is possible starting late Sunday into Monday for southwest Florida. Mother and infant were later taken to a hospital, it said.
Irma drenched the Tampa Bay region on Monday, lashing residents with 85-mph rains after hitting the southern half of the state the previous day.
Images out of Polk County, Florida shows the devastation occurring as first responders attempted to go out into the storm. The National Hurricane Center cautioned that tornadoes remained possible in northeast Florida as well as southeast parts of Georgia and SC into the evening.
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In Georgia, 540,000 residents were told to leave the coast, while in SC, almost 45,000 people were ordered to evacuate.
