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This is the path that Hurricane Irma will take

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Dramatic video shows Hurricane Irma slamming into Sint Maarten

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Hurricane Irma is bearing down on the Caribbean and bringing 300 km winds and heavy flooding to the island of Sint Maarten. For more info, please go to http://globalnews.ca/news/3720930/hurricane-irma-storm-landfall/ Subscribe to Global News Channel HERE: http://bit.ly/20fcXDc Like Global News on Facebook HERE: http://bit.ly/255GMJQ Follow Global News on Twitter HERE: http://bit.ly/1Toz8mt

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Hurricane Irma churned toward Florida on Saturday, leaving a trail of death and destruction across the Caribbean and prompting one of the largest emergency evacuations in American history.

The storm shifted west, putting the Florida Keys in its cross hairs and prompting officials to open more shelters. By 7 a.m., the outer bands of Irma had begun moving into Miami-Dade County.

"Expect damaging winds and heavy rain," the National Weather Service warned.

At least 20 people were confirmed dead by Friday night, when Irma made landfall in Cuba as a Category 5, lashing the island's northern coast with a direct hit.

The hurricane was downgraded to Category 4 around 5 a.m. but was expected to strengthen before reaching Florida. About 5.6 million people - more than a quarter of the state's population - have been ordered to leave their homes.

"The storm is here," Gov. Rick Scott said Saturday morning, noting that 25,000 people had already lost power.

He said the storm surge could reach 12 feet. "This will cover your house," he said. "You will not survive all this storm surge."
Here's the latest:
* The National Hurricane Center said that Irma remained "extremely dangerous." The storm's outer bands were hitting the Florida Keys on Saturday morning, with winds of 130 m.p.h., and the eye of the storm was expected to hit southwest Florida and Tampa on Sunday. The center warned of "life-threatening surge and wind." Check out our maps tracking the storm.

* In addition to the evacuation order in Miami, one of the country's largest evacuations, an additional 540,000 people were told to leave the Georgia coast. Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina have declared states of emergency.

* Irma became the first Category 5 hurricane to make landfall in Cuba since 1924.

* Hurricane Jose, upgraded to a Category 4, was barreling toward the Leeward Islands. On St. Martin, already devastated by Irma, Dutch Marines dropped fliers from a helicopter warning inhabitants to head to shelters.

* Hurricane Katia, which made landfall on Mexico's eastern coast, was downgraded to a tropical storm, with winds of 40 m.p.h.

Sign up for the Morning Briefing for hurricane news and a daily look at what you need to know to begin your day.

SEVERITY Category 5 4 3 2 1 Tropical storm

Governor to Floridians: Evacuate now

During a news conference Saturday morning, Gov. Rick Scott urged Floridians to heed evacuation orders and seek shelter immediately.

"Evacuate," he said. "Not tonight, not in an hour. You need to go right now."

He reassured those who were still delaying that they would not have to leave the state. More than 260 shelters were already operating across every county, with 70 more scheduled to open throughout the day.

Evacuation routes across the state were moving consistently, the governor said, adding that he had dispatched additional state troopers to maintain the flow of traffic.

"Just remember this," he said, "Once the storm starts, law enforcement cannot save you."

Florida ports have been closed for the duration of the storm, cutting off access to additional fuel. Governor Scott said that fuel trucks would continue to restock gas stations for as long as possible, and announced that he had waived import taxes for the next several days to allow for quick replenishment as soon as the storm had passed.

Volunteers were needed at shelters that were serving people with special needs. "We need more nurses," the governor said, asking those who were willing to work to email BPRCHDpreparedness@flhealth.gov. "All available nurses, if you'll please respond." - C AITLIN DICKERSON

A dangerous storm surge

The winds of Hurricane Irma are fierce. But the surge from the storm could also cause tremendous damage to coastal cities.

"It flows in very fast," Governor Scott said of the waters expected to rush into parts of the state. "It's going to go faster, possibly, than you are."

The National Hurricane Center provides a map of the potential storm surge from Irma, and the 5 a.m. Saturday forecast suggested a brutal surge near Naples topping nine feet.

More detailed projections can be found at the website adcirc.org, which is devoted to a highly respected suite of computer programs that model surge. Rick Luettich, one of the principal developers of Adcirc and director of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill's Institute of Marine Sciences, said that the current map of Florida under the models "looks a bit ugly," which he acknowledged was an understatement.

"For years, we have thought about areas of the country that are particularly vulnerable to hurricanes, and particularly, storm surge," Dr. Luettich said. New York City, New Orleans, Houston, and Miami are always high on such lists. "It's almost as if we've been going down the list and checking them off," he said.

The projections on the site, which are based on the forecasts from the National Hurricane Center and updated with each new forecast, allow users to look at any given report and see what would happen if the storm track shifts 50 percent to the west or to the east. (To try this, go to the map, pull down the advisory/track tab and hover your cursor over any report.)

With this storm, Dr. Luettich noted, those shifts can mean major differences in destructive storm surge for the Atlantic or Gulf coasts of Florida and farther up the Atlantic coast. - JOHN SCHWARTZ

Storm makes a direct hit on Cuba

Hurricane Irma made landfall on Friday night in the Camagüey Archipelago in Cuba. The storm's trajectory took many by surprise - Cuban meteorologists had not predicted a direct hit.

The eye of the storm, which was upgraded from a Category 4 hurricane, churned through the keys north of the main island at 11 p.m.

The storm not only put residents in peril, it also increased the prospect of economic damage: More than 50 hotels on the keys bring in tourists and much-needed hard currency for Cuba.

The fastest-growing sector of the island's economy, tourism has ballooned since the United States and Cuba announced a plan to re-establish diplomatic relations.

Though braced for the worst, there had been a sense that Cuba would escape the scale of damage in other Caribbean islands.

The Esmeraldo Weather Center in Camagüey registered winds of more than 124 miles per hour before part of the weather gauge blew off. State media reported waves more than 16 feet high, and damage to hospitals, factories and warehouses.

Electricity along much of Cuba's northern coast had been cut since Friday afternoon.

In Punta Alegre, a coastal village in Ciego de Ávila Province, fishermen used nets to tie their wooden houses to the ground. Fishing boats were nestled within thick mangrove to minimize destruction.

At 3 a.m. Saturday, the extent of the damage remained unclear, but state television provided glimpses. A local camera crew in the town of Ciego de Ávila broadcast footage of felled trees and smashed lampposts on the road outside the studio.

Close to one million people were evacuated before the storm hit Cuba. Tens of thousands of tourists were evacuated from resorts, shuttled inland in a convoy of buses flanked by police vehicles. The authorities also evacuated six dolphins by helicopter from a resort on the island of Cayo Guillermo.

The country made other preparations as well. Earlier in the week, the state went into overdrive to harvest rice and fruit early from low-lying areas of Granma Province, in the southeastern part of the island. Cattle were moved to higher ground throughout the country.

Schools and most businesses were closed in the east and center of the island. Trains, coaches and domestic air services were canceled.

Irma was forecast to move west, approaching the center of Cuba on Saturday evening.

Havana was expected to avoid the brunt of the storm, and the mood in the capital became less strained after meteorologists revised their projections. They now say Irma will cut north earlier than expected. The authorities in Havana are expecting flooding, however.

Residents of the capital have been boiling water, buying candles and stocking up on bread, just in case. - ED AUGUSTIN

Florida Keys brace for storm's arrival

With Hurricane Irma heading toward Florida, the situation became dire in the Keys, where officials opened four emergency shelters at the last minute and considered moving emergency workers to another county.

The low-lying Keys are vulnerable to life-threatening winds, dangerous storm surge or both. While the Lower Keys are on track to get a direct hit from the hurricane, the Middle and Upper Keys become more vulnerable to storm surge of five to 10 feet, Monroe County officials said in a statement.

The Friday forecast shifted Irma's path farther west and predicted a more direct hit for the city of Marathon, Fla., home of the county's emergency operations center. Officials considered moving south to Key West.

"We evacuated our visitors and have evacuated most of our residents," the Monroe County administrator, Roman Gastesi, said in the statement. "We continue to try to persuade our residents that remain in the Keys to get out while they still can."

"Now, we must think of the safety of our emergency operations staff and first responders and evacuate them out of harm's way."

The United States Coast Guard in Key West has already evacuated all its employees. - FRANCES ROBLES

The Bahamas gets ready for more

Residents of the western Bahamas braced for Irma on Saturday morning, even as the hurricane ripped apart sea walls, destroyed wooden homes and eroded roads on the nearby southern and central islands.

Severe flooding was reported on Acklins, where the settlement of Salina Point was completely cut off from the rest of the island, according to early reports from that area.

"There's been significant damage to houses on Ragged Island, and in certain parts of Acklins there's been a lot of road erosion. The Morton Salt plant in Inagua has also been significantly damaged. Crooked Island suffered a lot of roof damage," said Dion Foulkes, the Bahamas' minister of labour and consumer affairs, and a liaison with the National Emergency Management Agency in Nassau.

He said stone structures had fared well in the storm, and so far there have been no reports of deaths or injuries.

As soon as conditions permit, the Jamaican Defense Force has agreed to survey the affected Bahamian islands to help determine the extent of the damage, said Hubert Minnis, the Bahamian prime minister.

Bimini, Grand Bahama and Andros are expected to be the last group of Bahamian islands affected by Irma, starting early Sunday through Monday morning.

Around 300 residents of Bimini have been evacuated, and residents of the low-lying West End, Grand Bahama, have been urged to relocate east.

Dillon Knowles, 56, was busy making last minute preparations Saturday to secure PharmaChem Technologies, a chemical manufacturing operation on Grand Bahama.

"Most people here are prepared," said Mr. Knowles. And just like we've done in the past, we will sit and wait." - ERICA WELLS

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Hurricane Irma Live Updates: 'The Storm Is Here,' Florida Governor Says

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Hurricane Irma churned toward Florida on Saturday, leaving a trail of death and destruction across the Caribbean and prompting one of the largest emergency evacuations in American history. The storm shifted west, putting the Florida Keys in its cross hairs and prompting officials to open more shelters.

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Here is all you need to know about how a hurricane turns into a life threatening storm.

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Hsiang and Jina looked at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes observed from 1950 to 2008 and the economic fortunes of the countries they struck in the years that followed. With their data, Jina and Hsiang can decisively say: These storms are bad-very bad-for economic growth.

"There is no creative destruction," Jina told me. "These disasters hit us and [their effects] sit around for a couple of decades." He added, "Just demonstrating that that was true was probably the most interesting aspect for me to start with."

Hsiang and Jina find that such storms (which they group under the umbrella term "cyclones") can be as bad as some of the worst sorts of man-made economic challenges. A cyclone of a magnitude that a country would expect to see once every few years can slow down an economy on par with "a tax increase equal to one percent of GDP, a currency crisis, or a political crisis in which executive constraints are weakened." For a really bad storm (a magnitude you'd expect to see around the world only once every 10 years), the damage will be similar "to losses from a banking crisis." The very worst storms-the top percentile-"have losses that are larger and endure longer than any of those previously studied shocks."

Here's a little chart they made comparing these different sorts of disasters:

The effects are lasting: Overall, they find that "each additional meter per second of annual nationally-averaged wind exposure lowers per capita economic output 0.37 percent 20 years later" (emphasis added). Put simply, economies "do not recover in the long run."

So what does this mean for a planet with a changing climate?

Projections for storm patterns as the planet's climate morphs are, as Jina put it, "a very complex area." How do you choose which model to rely on? You go with, Jina says, "the best": those of Kerry Emanuel at MIT, world expert on cyclone patterns.

When they meshed their backward-looking empirical calculations with Emanuel's forward-looking projections, the number they got was startling: $9.7 trillion-the present discounted value "of expected losses due to enhanced cyclone activity" if we don't take any action to dial back greenhouse-gas emissions. (This is the calculation they make at the 95 percent confidence interval, though the figure could range from $3.9 trillion to $15.5 trillion.)

"For me," Jina says, "it is a very convincing argument to say that we need to mitigate as much climate change as we can."

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How Much Do Hurricanes Hurt the Economy?

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Hsiang and Jina looked at 6,712 cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes observed from 1950 to 2008 and the economic fortunes of the countries they struck in the years that followed. With their data, Jina and Hsiang can decisively say: These storms are bad-very bad-for economic growth. "There is no creative destruction," Jina told me.

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Why are hurricanes given feminine names???

Cause if they were given masculine names they'd be called "himmacanes"

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Learn about all the categories of hurricanes!

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Learn about all the categories of hurricanes!

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Yay!

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Why Hurricane Categories Make a Difference

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Hurricanes kill people btw.

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Hurricanes: The Greatest Storms on Earth : Feature Articles

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Few things in nature can compare to the destructive force of a hurricane. Called the greatest storm on Earth, a hurricane is capable of annihilating coastal areas with sustained winds of 155 mph or higher and intense areas of rainfall and a storm surge.

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A picture of Hurricane Irma from space.

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This is what hurricane Irma is effecting

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Florida is bracing for a possibly catastrophic hit from Hurricane Irma, and even with the fourth largest economy in the United States, the economic impact to the Sunshine State could be severe.

The most recent models predict the storm will climb up the state's southwest coast. Towns from Cape Sable to Captiva could see "catastrophic" storm surge flooding of 10 to 15 feet, according to the National Hurricane Center. The area around Tampa Bay could see five to eight feet of storm surge.

As scores of people from across the state fled the storm, gas stations were depleted of fuel and major stores announced shortages of water and other supplies. The state's tourism industry, which draws billions of dollars and millions of visitors each year, could take a major hit if infrastructure and airports are badly damaged.

Here's all the ways Hurricane Irma could impact Florida's businesses and economy.

Air travel

Irma has already destroyed or badly damaged airports, runways and other infrastructure in the Caribbean Islands, halting commercial air travel. Next, it's headed for several key airports in Florida.

Miami, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale are home to the 12th, 13th, 21st largest airports in the U.S., handling more than 115 million passengers in 2016.

Tampa International Airport is bracing for what could be a devastating direct hit from Irma. The 29th busiest U.S. airport by passenger count will shut down completely by 8 p.m. ET Saturday. The storm is expected to hit the Tampa area around 8 a.m. Monday.

All of southern and central Florida's airports are expected to shutter operations by Saturday evening as the area braces for Irma, which is expected to make landfall on Sunday.

It's not clear how long the airports will remain shuttered. American Airlines said it'll all depend on how well the airports hold up in the storm and how long it'll take crewmembers to get back to work.

Agriculture

It's already been a rough year for the famed Florida oranges. The state's fruit industry has been hit by "citrus greening," a plant disease that has wiped out crops and cut production by about two-thirds in recent years.

Irma could make things even worse. The damaging winds Irma is expected to bring could rip the fruit off of trees, ruining the crops, just as the harvest season is about to begin.

Orange juice prices have already been creeping higher as Florida braces for the storm.

Other crops may be spared Irma's wrath, but it'll depend on the storm's course, which is still uncertain.

Florida's agriculture, fishing and horticulture industries bring in $150 billion per year.

Energy

Florida Power & Light, the state's largest electric utility company, is warning that as many as 9 million residents could be affected by power outages at some point during the storm. About 35,000 homes in Miami-Dade county have already lost power because of heavy winds and rain, according to a post from Florida Light and Power. Some people in South Florida could be without electricity for weeks.

"With a storm of this magnitude, there will be widespread destruction throughout our service territory, and most of it will be in the most densely populated areas of South Florida," the utility's CEO, Eric Silagy, said in a statement. "This likely will be one of the most challenging restorations that our country has ever seen."

The utility also said Thursday that two nuclear power generating stations are shutting down before Irma hits.

Combined, the plants produce enough electricity to power nearly 2 million homes for one year. It's not yet clear when they'll be able to come back online.

Gasoline

As mandatory evacuations were issued, fuel shortages have been rampant across Florida gas stations as residents rushed to top off before heading north. Nearly 40% of Miami's gas stations, for example, were completely out of stock Friday.

The shortages have been made worse by the fact that a significant chunk of U.S. refinery capacity was knocked offline when Hurricane Harvey struck the Gulf Coast two weeks ago.

The nationwide average gas price has spiked more than 32 cents since then, to $2.67, and it's even worse in Florida, where the average price is up to $2.73.

Tourism

Florida's endless miles of sandy beaches are also its goldmine. Tourists are drawn to its shores and theme parks, most notably Disney World and Universal Studios. And visitors pump billions of dollarsinto the state's economy every year.

And for the southern string of islands known as the Florida Keys, which are expected to take a direct hit from Irma, tourism is the single largest industry. It accounts for $2.7 billion of business a year, 60% of spending and 54% of jobs in the region.

It's not peak season for visiting the Keys, but authorities and business leaders are worried about the damage Irma could inflict to the hotels and other buildings in the area. If Irma leaves significant damage it, it could be a major problem for the local economy.

Overall economy

Florida's economy has been chugging along lately, showing promising signs of recovery after the 2008 market crash wreaked havoc on the state. Unemployment rates are down, growth is up and new homes were being built across the state.

But Irma could change all that.

The storm could have an immediate impact on the job market. After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas two weeks ago, jobless claims surged to the highest level in more than tow years. Irma has the potential to be even worse.

Florida's economic recovery has been fueled by people moving to the state in droves. But, if Irma causes significant damage, it could trigger a slowdown in migration and stall further growth.

--CNNMoney's Chris Isidore, Matt Egan and Jon Ostrower contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 9, 2017: 9:49 AM ET

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Florida's economy poised to take a major hit from Hurricane Irma

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The most recent models predict the storm will climb up the state's southwest coast. Towns from Cape Sable to Captiva could see "catastrophic" storm surge flooding of 10 to 15 feet, according to the National Hurricane Center. The area around Tampa Bay could see five to eight feet of storm surge.

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This is how the hurricane irma affects homes 

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This is how the hurricane irma affects homes 

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ST. MAARTEN - Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte says the death toll caused by Hurricane Irma on the Caribbean territory of St. Maarten has risen to four.

Rutte said Sunday, "unfortunately there are more victims to mourn" after the bodies of two people washed up on the island. He says the identities of the victims are not yet known.

One of the four people listed as victims by the Dutch authorities died of natural causes as the Category 5 hurricane lashed St. Maarten, badly damaging or destroying 70 percent of homes on the Dutch part of the Caribbean island.

Trademark and Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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Hurricane Irma-related death toll rises to 4 in St. Maarten

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ST. MAARTEN - Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte says the death toll caused by Hurricane Irma on the Caribbean territory of St. Maarten has risen to four. Rutte said Sunday, "unfortunately there are more victims to mourn" after the bodies of two people washed up on the island.

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Hurricane Irma damage | Video compilation