Updated: 7:50am – Hurricane Irma has hit Florida with 200km/h winds, flooding the only road connecting the Florida Keys with the mainland and knocking out power to more than 1.6 million homes.
Brian Entin, reporter for South Florida TV station WSVN, is in downtown Miami and filmed water rising along one of the city’s main streets.
Officials warned that Irma’s heavy storm surge – seawater driven on land by high winds – could bring floods of up to 4.6 m along the state’s western Gulf Coast.
It submerged the highway that connects the isolated Florida Keys archipelago with the mainland and flooded streets between Miami office towers.
The storm is one of the most powerful ever seen in the Atlantic and has already killed two dozen people in the Caribbean and pummelled Cuba with 11m waves on Sunday. Some 6.5 million people, about a third of the state’s population, had been ordered to evacuate southern Florida.
Governor Rick Scott said there was serious threat of “significant storm surge flooding” along the entire west coast of Florida. “This is a life-threatening situation,” he said.
At least 1.6 million Florida homes and businesses had lost power, according to local electricity companies. The storm winds downed a construction crane and shook tall buildings in Miami, which was about 150km from Irma’s core.
Miami streets were flooded as the water crept up on and around Brickell Avenue, which runs from the waterfront through the city’s financial district and newly built high rises. Irma is now a Category 4 storm, the second-highest designation.
One woman in Miami’s Little Haiti neighbourhood delivered her own baby, with medical personnel coaching her on the phone because emergency responders were not able to reach her, the city of Miami said on Twitter. The two are now at the hospital, it said.
The severe weather is also understood to have caused a crash in which a man has died in a pickup truck.
South Florida’s large population of elderly residents posed a severe test for the emergency shelters, many of which were not equipped for people with elaborate medical needs.
Irma comes just days after Hurricane Harvey dumped record-setting rain in Texas, causing unprecedented flooding, killing at least 60 people and leaving an estimated $US180 billion in property damage in its wake. Almost three months remain in the Atlantic hurricane season, which runs through to November.
– RNZ / Reuters
