Hurricane Irma makes landfall in Florida
Channel: HUDA
Date: 2017-09-11

Hurricane Irma: storm surge causes record flooding in north-east Florida – live updates


Had the center of Irma hit Florida 20 to 30 miles (32-50 kilometers) to the east its impact would have been much worse, meteorologists have told AP.

Florida can thank Cuba, where it did hit as a Category 5 storm, said Maue and Jeff Masters, meteorology director for Weather Underground.

Irma would probably have hit Florida as a Category 5 hurricane if it had missed Cuba, Masters said.

The storm briefly trekked over Cuba’s low populated coast Friday evening through Saturday afternoon. That weakened Irma enough that when upper level winds from the west eroded some of the storm’s top and also blew in dry air, it had the combined of effect of making Irma more ragged, Masters said. It was at that point, he said, that Irma’s southwest eyewall sort of came apart, no longer a perfect circle on satellite imagery.

Slightly weakened from Cuba, the storm got caught up in competing weather systems a little longer, delaying its northward right turn into Florida. And that delay pushed the track further west, making it more of a threat to Florida’s west coast than its east.

Meanwhile, Cuba has sent hundreds heath workers doctors to several other Caribbean island hit by Irma, the Independent reports.

More than 750 health workers have arrived in Antigua, Barbuda, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Saint Lucia, the Bahamas, Dominica and Haiti.

They have been told to follow the guidelines of the Ministry of Public Health (Minsap) and to contribute to aiding the recovery of regions that have been hit by the hurricane.

“The collaboration of the Central Medical Cooperation Unit, together with the Minsap Management Center, and our embassies, have maintained the communication to assess the damages and assess what help our own collaborators could provide,” Regla Angulo Pardo, the director of the Central Unit of Medial Cooperation in Cuba, told Granma.



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