Miami under hurricane watch as ferocious Hurricane Irma bears down after killing 13 in Caribbean

Hurricane Irma took aim at South Florida on Thursday, threatening millions with historic winds, huge storm surges and unrelenting rainfall as it left behind a trail of still-uncharted devastation in the Caribbean and a death toll that climbed to at least 13.
 
As the monster Category 5 storm tracked west-northwest with 175-mph winds, the caprices of wind and water saved impoverished Haiti and the Dominican Republic from a direct hit. But Irma bore down late Thursday on other Caribbean targets: the low-lying Turks and Caicos, and parts of the Bahamas.

Meanwhile, the peril to the U.S. mainland grew.

“It has become more likely that Irma will make landfall in southern Florida as a dangerous major hurricane, and bring life-threatening storm surge and wind impacts to much of the state,” the National Hurricane Center said.

With South Florida under a hurricane watch, Philip Levine, the mayor of vulnerable barrier-island Miami Beach, called Irma a “nuclear hurricane.” Irma’s leading edge was expected to reach Florida as soon as Saturday, and Gov. Rick Scott spoke of a “catastrophic storm that our state has never seen.”

The hurricane has left a string of small, devastated Caribbean islands counting their dead and struggling to restore links to the outside world. Chaotic conditions hampered efforts to compile a fatality toll, which officials said reached at least 13 and would probably grow.

Three people died in the U.S. Virgin Islands and three more in Puerto Rico, their respective governors said, and the Netherlands government confirmed a fatality in St. Maarten, the shattered Dutch side of the island it shares with St. Martin, a French territory. French officials, however, revised downward from eight to four the number of people confirmed dead on the French side.

As the storm passed Puerto Rico, it dealt the U.S. territory what was in meteorological terms a glancing blow, but one that landed like a stunning punch, exacerbated by already faltering infrastructure. The governor, Ricardo Rossello, reported that a million people were left without power, and the National Weather Service in San Juan warned of flash-flooding danger from swollen rivers.

Irma’s howling winds weakened slightly to 175 mph as the eye passed to the north of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. But even a sideswipe by such a intense storm carried devastating power. Hispaniola, the island the two countries share, was lashed by gales and torrential rains.
In the north of Haiti, where a hurricane last year killed some 900 people, many learned of government evacuation orders only from neighbors or relatives. Frightened people in the country’s north cut branches from trees to try to shore up roofs, said Mishelle Mitchell of the humanitarian group World Vision, who was in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

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