The plate of spaghetti models being served up by the National Hurricane Center does not look good for Tampa Bay. After spending the better part of this past week scaring the sh*t out of South Florida, the latest forecast has Hurricane Irma tacking more and more west.
Hurricane Irma’s relentless advance on Florida narrowed the window for residents to get to safety, with the latest forecasts shifting landfall southwest of the heavily populated Miami metro area. The enormous storm regained Category 5 status late Friday as winds hit 160 mph (260 kph). Forecasters expect the storm to be near the Florida Keys on Sunday morning and approach the state’s southwest coast by that afternoon. In one of the country’s largest evacuations, about 5.6 million people in Florida…
Catastrophic, life-threatening, extremely dangerous. Scary? Forecasters hope so. The National Weather Service are using as fearful words as they can, on purpose, to warn people about Hurricane Irma and shock them into action, just as they did last month for Hurricane Harvey. “Words like catastrophic, get out, life-threatening, hopefully it will sink in,” said National Hurricane Center spokesman and meteorologist Dennis Feltgen. The weather office on the Florida Keys may have done him one better. “(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk)THIS IS AS REAL AS…
For hundreds of Northern retirees, paradise looks like the pastel-colored mobile homes just off A1A, the highway that runs the length of Florida’s eastern coast. The Atlantic Ocean is just across the road, and the beach is flat and wide and firm – perfect for morning strolls and so different from their former homes in places like New York, New Jersey and Wisconsin. In the evenings, the residents sometimes drive their golf carts to the bank of the Halifax River…
Roads became clogged and fuel supplies strained as more than 1 million people were told to find shelter inland, upstate or in neighboring states in advance of massive Hurricane Irma, which will blanket most of Florida this weekend.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, appearing on MSNBC Friday afternoon, had some praise for President Donald Trump‘s handling of hurricane preparation. Bush, who saw eight storms during one two-year period in his tenure, noted that Irma is “bigger and meaner” than anything he dealt with before.
With tropical storm-force winds less than 24 hours away, Hurricane Irma also is expected to bring storm surge of 6-12 feet to the state’s southern coasts, Gov. Rick Scott said Friday night. “Our state has never seen anything like this before,” he said. The governor spoke at an evening news briefing from the state’s Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee. “Think about that: It could cover your house,” Scott told reporters. “This storm surge will rush in; it could kill you.”
