Florida power company says restoration ‘will take weeks’ after Irma

Hurricane Irma gave Florida a coast-to-coast pummeling with winds up to 130 miles per hour Sunday, swamping homes and boats, knocking out power to millions and toppling massive construction cranes over the Miami skyline.

A flash flood warning is in effect along the southern coast of SC, where more than 40,000 were ordered to evacuate barrier islands. The path of the storm, tracking the west coast of Florida, meant it might be less destructive than it would otherwise have been, Trump said, noting the next five or six hours would be critical. She had no further details.

Hurricane Irma will likely make landfall in south Florida early Sunday morning.

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.

For the second straight week, Hurricane Irma is causing scheduling problems in the college football world.

Three quarters of the people in the county at one point had lost their power.

Shelters across western Florida opened, filled up – and often closed because of overcrowding – after the storm made a western shift on Saturday.

RICK SCOTT: The storm surge comes after the strongest winds. Palm Beach County had more than 500,000 offline. “The region is flat and flood-prone, and by some estimates it is the nation’s most vulnerable area in the event of a hurricane strike”, the Washington Post reports. But that explanation may not be reaching everyone, and it seems some households are risking their safety by not evacuating or shoring up their homes, out of a misguided belief they are out of range.

In one of the largest US evacuations, almost 7 million people in the Southeast were warned to seek shelter elsewhere, including 6.4 million in Florida alone. No injuries were reported.

A tropical storm warning has been extended to all of Central Georgia. Some travel-industry observers were fretting Sunday that a slow resumption of service could start toppling dominoes at other airports like Atlanta as early as Monday.

The Foreign Secretary said there had been an “unprecedented” effort to deal with the aftermath of the storm.

Curfews were imposed overnight in Miami, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale and much of the rest of South Florida, and some arrests of violators were reported.

Though the centre is expected to miss Miami, the metro area will still get pounded with life-threatening hurricane winds, Mr Feltgen said.

As of midmorning, Irma’s outer bands were also blowing into Georgia, where the storm’s center was expected to arrive later in the day.

About half the city’s land area is covered by trees – a larger share than most urban centers. “We can hear the wind battering the door and trees outside”.

By Sunday morning, weather monitoring equipment at airports across South Florida, including Miami, were offline, underscoring the damage Irma is doing to airport infrastructure.

In metro Atlanta, MARTA suspended its Monday bus and rail service ahead of the storm.

Georgia Power spokeswoman Holly Crawford said Monday the areas with the most power outages were coastal Glynn and Chatham counties.

Ms Elliott, 38, who was working overseas when the hurricane hit, said she fears her fiance and two young children may run out of supplies in the coming days.