Rico's rants: Irma gets worse

Emily Shapiro, Morgan Winsor, Julia Jacobo, and David Caplan have a Good Morning America article via Yahoo (with an unbloggable video) about Hurricane Irma:

Hurricane Irma, the most powerful Atlantic storm in a decade, hit Cuba overnight as a rare Category 5 storm, then shifted course toward the west coast of Florida.
The monster storm's shift in direction creates a "very, very dangerous situation for western Florida," said ABC News meteorologist Daniel Manzo (photo).
As of 0800 Saturday morning, Irma was a Category 4 with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph. It was about 225 miles from Miami, Florida, moving west-northwest at twelve miles an hour.
Naples, Fort Myers, and other communities on Florida's west coast could get slammed when Irma makes landfall as a Category 4 storm, which is expected to happen between early Sunday and early Monday. Landfall could occur as far north as Tampa.
Wind gusts in Florida were already picking up early Saturday, with Miami International Airport reporting a sixty mile-per-hour gust.

Power outages, halted flights and empty ATMs in Florida. South Florida is already experiencing power outages, according to the Florida Power & Light Company. As of 0300 on Saturday, in Miami-Dade County there were 9,613 outages affecting 1,124,252 customers. In Broward County, which includes Fort Lauderdale, there were five hundred outages affecting a million customers.
Florida alone should anticipate days-long power outages, FEMA said.
Ahead of Irma's arrival in the Sunshine State, the last flights departed Friday night from Miami International Airport and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Miami's airport officially remains open, while Fort Lauderdale's airport is closed for Saturday and Sunday.
Many ATM machines across southwest Florida were out of cash by late Friday night, after people stocked up in case Hurricane Irma causes power outages that make debit and credit card transactions impossible, The Associated Press reported.
Hurricane Irma 'could be worse' than Hurricane Andrew, Florida Governor Rick Scott warned.
On Friday, The National Hurricane Center cautioned that Irma, which then had maximum sustained winds of 155 mph, was "extremely dangerous", strong enough to uproot trees, bring down power poles, and rip off the roofs and some exterior walls of well-built frame homes."Obviously Hurricane Irma continues to be a threat that is going to devastate the United States," Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), said at a press conference on Friday morning. "We're going to have a couple of rough days."
Rainfall accumulations in southeast Florida and the Florida Keys are expected to reach ten to fifteen inches, with up to twenty inches locally. Eastern Florida, up the coast to Georgia, is expected to receive eight to twelve inches, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Approximately six million Floridians have either been ordered to evacuate or advised to leave voluntarily, the Florida Division of Emergency Management told ABC News late Friday night. When evacuation orders in South Carolina and Georgia are included, the number exceeds six million.
Georgia Governor Nathan Deal declared a state of emergency for nearly a hundred counties in his state, and South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster issued mandatory evacuations for barrier islands in Colleton, Beaufort, and Jasper counties.

Hurricane Irma traffic streaming out of Florida creeps along northbound Interstate 75 after a vehicle accident in Lake Park, Georgia on 6 September 2017.

There are facilities to shelter a million people in Florida, a FEMA spokesperson told ABC News, although there was a question whether there is enough staffing to serve all of those in shelters.
With the window closing fast for anyone wanting to escape, Irma hurtled toward Florida with 125 mph winds Saturday on a new projected track that could put the Tampa area, not Miami, in the crosshairs. Tampa has not taken a direct hit from a major hurricane in nearly a century.
"You need to leave, not tonight, not in an hour, right now," Governor Rick Scott warned residents in the evacuation zones ahead of the storm's predicted arrival on Sunday morning.
For days, the forecast had made it look as if the Miami metropolitan area of six million people on Florida's Atlantic coast could get hit head-on with the catastrophic and long-dreaded Big One.
The westward swing in the hurricane's projected path overnight caught many on Florida's Gulf coast off guard. By late morning, few businesses in St. Petersburg and its barrier islands had put plywood or hurricane shutters on their windows, and some locals groused about the change in the forecast. "For five days, we were told it was going to be on the east coast, and then 24 hours before it hits, we're now told it's coming up the west coast," said Jeff Beerbohm, a fifty-year-old entrepreneur in St. Petersburg. "As usual, the weatherman, I don't know why they're paid."
Tampa has not been struck by a major hurricane since 1921, when its population was about ten thousand, National Hurricane Center spokesman Dennis Feltgen said. Now the area has around three million people.
The new course threatened everything from Tampa Bay's bustling twin cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg to Naples' mansion- and yacht-lined canals, Sun City Center's sprawling compound of modest retirement homes, and Sanibel Island's shell-filled beaches.
Forecasters warned of storm surge as high as fifteen feet along a swath of southwest Florida and beyond. "This is going to sneak up on people," said Jamie Rhome, head of the hurricane center's storm surge unit.
With the new forecast, Pinellas County, home to St. Petersburg, ordered a quarter million people to leave, while Georgia scaled back evacuation orders for some coastal residents.
Irma has left more than twenty people dead in its wake across the Caribbean, ravaging such resort islands as St. Martin, St. Barts, St. Thomas, Barbuda, and Antigua. The storm weakened slightly in the morning, but was expected to pick up strength again before hitting the Sunshine State.
Meteorologists predicted its center would blow ashore Sunday in the perilously low-lying Florida Keys, then hit southwestern Florida and move north, plowing into the Tampa Bay area. Though the center is expected to miss Miami, the metro area will still get pounded with life-threatening hurricane winds, Feltgen said.
On Saturday morning, the state was already beginning to feel Irma's muscle. Nearly thirty thousand people had lost power, mostly in and around Miami and Fort Lauderdale, as the wind began gusting.
In Key West, sixty-year-old Carol Walterson Stroud sought refuge in a senior center with her husband, granddaughter and dog. The streets were nearly empty, shops were boarded up and the wind started to blow. "Tonight, I'm sweating," she said. "Tonight, I'm scared to death."
In one of the biggest evacuations ever ordered in the US, over six million people in Florida, more than one-quarter of the state's population, were warned to leave. Gas shortages and gridlock plagued the evacuations. Parts of interstates 75 and 95 north were bumper-to-bumper.
Some fifty thousand people crowded three hundred shelters across Florida. At Germain Arena, not far from Fort Myers, on Florida's southwestern corner, thousands waited in a snaking line for hours to gain a spot in the hockey venue-turned-shelter.
"We'll never get in," Jamilla Bartley lamented as she stood in the parking lot.
The governor activated all seven thousand members of the Florida National Guard, and thirty thousand guardsmen from elsewhere were on standby.
Major tourist attractions, including Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and Sea World, prepared to close Saturday. The Miami and Fort Lauderdale airports shut down, and those in Orlando and Tampa planned to do the same later in the day.
With winds that peaked at 185 mph, Irma was once the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the open Atlantic. Given its mammoth size and strength and its projected course, it could still prove one of the most devastating hurricanes ever to hit Florida and inflict damage on a scale not seen here in twenty-five years.
It could also test the Federal Emergency Management Agency's ability to handle two crises at the same time. FEMA is still dealing with aftermath of catastrophic Hurricane Harvey in the Houston, Texas area.
Ray Scarborough and his 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. He was twelve when Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992, and remembers lying on the floor in a hall 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 forty-year-old boat captain. "That one tore everything apart."
Andrew razed Miami's suburbs with winds topping 165 mph, damaging or blowing apart over a hundred thousand homes. The damage in Florida totaled twenty-six billion dollars, and at least forty people died.