Mass Florida evacuation underway as Irma magnitude expands
MIAMI (September 9, 2017) — The window for Florida residents to safely evacuate narrowed Saturday as Hurricane Irma’s outer bands blew into the southern part of the state on a predicted path for landfall southwest of the heavily populated Miami metro area.
The enormous storm weakened slightly to Category 4 with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph (215 kph), but it was expected to pick up strength again as it takes aim at Florida. The storm was forecast to reach the Florida Keys on Sunday morning before moving up the state’s Gulf Coast.
The National Weather Service said damaging winds were moving into areas including Key Biscayne and Coral Gables on Saturday morning, while gusts of up to 56 mph (90 kph) were reported on Virginia Key off Miami.
The governor urged everybody in the Keys, where forecasters expect the storm to hit first, to get out.
Ray Scarborough and girlfriend Leah Etmanczyk left their home in Big Pine Key and fled north with her parents and three big dogs to stay with relatives in Orlando. Scarborough was 12 when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992 and remembers lying on the floor in a hallway as the storm nearly ripped the roof off his house.
“
They said this one is going to be bigger than Andrew. When they told me that, that’s all I needed to hear,” said Scarborough, now a 37-year-old boat captain. “That one tore everything apart.”
Their house in the Keys, up on 6-foot (1.8-meter) stilts, has flooded before.
Nevertheless,
forecasters warned that its hurricane-force winds were so wide they could reach from coast to coast, testing the nation’s third-largest state, which has undergone rapid development and more stringent hurricane-proof building codes in the last decade or so.
“This is a storm that will kill you if you don’t get out of the way,” National Hurricane Center meteorologist Dennis Feltgen said. “Everybody’s going to feel this one.”
https://www.onenewsnow.com/ap/united-states/mass-florida-evacuation-underway-as-irma-magnitude-expands
