Hurricane Irma

• 1. Introduction

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  Hurricane Irma was the most searched term on Google in 2017, both in the United States and across the whole world. Soon after it struck, people coined a new word to describe the wreckage: Irmageddon. By the time the storm dissolved over the American Midwest, it had killed at least 134 people in the Caribbean and the United States. Among all the tropical cyclones on Earth that year, none matched its wind speed.

  So how does a cluster of thunderstorms leaving Africa turn into something that record books have to be rewritten for? Why did one island lose almost every building while another, only a short distance away, lost mostly roofs and fences? What did it look like when a whole state tried to flee at once, and why did the storm leave some of the worst scenes in places few outsiders could name? And once the wind died down, who actually arrived to help, and how fast?

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• 2. Birth Off Cape Verde

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  On the 27th of August 2017, a tropical wave drifted off the west coast of Africa, trailing a broad mass of deep thunderstorms. Over the next few days those storms bunched up toward the northern end of the disturbance, and a surface circulation took shape by the 30th. The National Hurricane Center judged it a tropical depression at about 00:00 UTC that day, roughly 120 nautical miles southwest of the Cape Verde Islands. Six hours later it earned a name, becoming Tropical Storm Irma, the ninth named storm of an extremely active Atlantic season.

  Warm sea surface temperatures and very little wind shear gave the young storm everything it needed. At about 06:00 UTC on the 31st of August, Irma grew an eye and became a hurricane, just 30 hours after it had formed. By 00:00 UTC on the 1st of September it was a major hurricane. Within a single 48-hour stretch its winds had climbed by 80 mph.

  The climb then stalled for a few days as the storm reorganized its inner core in repeated eyewall replacement cycles. On the 3rd of September, the first aircraft reconnaissance flight into Irma found an eye 29 miles across and surface winds of 115 mph. A second, stronger burst of intensification began on the 4th of September, and by early the next day Irma was a Category 5 hurricane.

  Its sustained winds peaked at 180 mph, and by then the storm had taken on a large, symmetric central dense overcast, the tidy circular cloud shield typical of an annular hurricane. Its minimum pressure bottomed out at 914 millibars, the lowest the Atlantic had produced since Hurricane Dean in 2007.

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• 3. Seven Landfalls

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  At 05:45 UTC on the 6th of September, Irma's eye crossed the northern coast of Barbuda with its peak strength intact. Over the following hours it made more landfalls the same day, reaching Sint Maarten at 11:15 UTC and Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands at 16:30 UTC. It kept those peak conditions until noon UTC, then continued west-northwest along the northern edge of the Greater Antilles.

  Early on the 8th of September, an eyewall replacement cycle finally pulled Irma down to Category 4 as it passed south of the Turks and Caicos Islands. That ended a stretch of 60 hours at Category 5, the second-longest any Atlantic storm had held winds above 156 mph. Only the 1932 Cuba hurricane had held them longer.

  A strengthening subtropical ridge to the north bent Irma's course toward the west, and the finished eyewall let it climb back to Category 5 at 18:00 UTC east of Cuba. At 03:00 UTC on the 9th of September, it struck Cayo Romano with winds of 165 mph. Only one earlier Category 5 hurricane, in 1924, had ever hit Cuba. Days of grinding along the island's northern coast dropped Irma to a high-end Category 2.

  Then the steering pattern shifted. Irma rounded the southwestern edge of a subtropical high and turned northwest toward Florida. Over the warm Straits of Florida it surged back to Category 4 by 06:00 UTC on the 10th of September. At 13:00 UTC it reached Cudjoe Key with 130 mph winds. Its seventh and final landfall came at 19:30 UTC on Marco Island as a Category 3 hurricane with 115 mph winds.

  Inland, shear, land friction and dry air wore the storm down fast. It fell to a tropical storm on the 11th of September as it entered southern Georgia, became a remnant low over Alabama by 06:00 UTC on the 12th, and faded out over Missouri the next day. Along the way it had become the first Category 5 hurricane on record to strike the Leeward Islands, and the third-strongest Atlantic hurricane at landfall ever recorded, behind the 1935 Labor Day hurricane, Melissa and Dorian. In Florida, it was the most intense hurricane to hit the continental United States since Katrina in 2005, and the first Category 4 there since Charley in 2004. Two weeks later, Hurricane Maria would strike the same region at Category 5 intensity too.

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• 4. Before the Wind

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  On the 5th of September, hurricane warnings went up for the northern Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico and parts of Hispaniola. Expecting a direct hit, more than half of Barbuda's residents took shelter. In Guadeloupe, 22 of the island's 32 communes activated emergency plans, and 1,500 people were urged to leave low-lying and cliff-edge homes. That island was spared the worst and became the base for relief efforts on Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy. Puerto Rico had already declared a state of emergency on the 4th of September, and by the 6th the Federal Emergency Management Agency had response teams there and in the United States Virgin Islands.

  The Dominican Republic activated the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters on the 5th of September to obtain humanitarian satellite coverage. Officials there evacuated 11,200 people and moved about 7,400 tourists from beach resorts to Santo Domingo. Next door, Haiti struggled. Some officials blamed reluctance and indifference among the population, while others admitted they were not prepared and that no mandatory evacuation orders were in place.

  In the Turks and Caicos, warnings went out in English, Creole and Spanish through social media, radio, text messages and WhatsApp. The Bahamas flew 1,609 people out of the southern islands by the 7th of September, 365 of them from Bimini. Of the 2,679 foreign tourists still in the country that day, about 1,200 were sheltering at Atlantis Paradise Island, one of the most hurricane-ready structures in the country. Cuba evacuated nearly one million people from low-lying areas, and at a resort on Cayo Guillermo even the dolphins were moved out by helicopter.

  Florida's governor, Rick Scott, declared a state of emergency on the 4th of September and put 100 members of the National Guard on duty. By the 8th, all 7,000 troops were ordered to report. He suspended tolls on every toll road, and state offices closed from the 8th to the 11th. Public schools and universities shut in all 67 counties. Almost 700 shelters opened and collectively housed about 191,764 people. Nearly 9,000 flights to and from the state were canceled. For the fifth time in its 45-year history, Walt Disney World closed completely, and Kennedy Space Center stayed shut from the 8th to the 15th.

  An estimated 6.5 million Floridians evacuated, the largest evacuation in American history. Because the whole peninsula sat inside the forecast cone of uncertainty, people from both coasts fled north, jamming Interstate 95, Interstate 75 and Florida's Turnpike. Fuel ran short along the routes, with hours-long lines and Florida Highway Patrol escorts for fuel trucks. From the 8th of September, drivers on northbound Interstate 75 were allowed to use the left shoulder as a lane. It was the first time the state had used its new shoulder-use plan, chosen over the labor-intensive reversal of an entire highway.

  Georgia's governor, Nathan Deal, ordered 540,000 people on the coast to leave and reversed lanes on Interstate 16 from Savannah to Dublin. Atlanta received its first-ever tropical storm warning. Atlanta Motor Speedway opened an 800-acre camping area to evacuees for free. Sports calendars bent as well. The Miami Dolphins game against Tampa Bay was pushed to the 19th of November, and the Tampa Bay Rays and New York Yankees moved a series to Citi Field in Queens. Florida State's rivalry game against the Miami Hurricanes, set for the 16th of September, was postponed to the 7th of October.

  Money was a worry too. On the 5th of September, FEMA's funds were running dangerously low after its response to Hurricane Harvey in Texas. The Trump administration asked for an immediate 8 billion dollars. The Senate nearly doubled that to 15.3 billion, on the understanding that even this was only about a tenth of what Harvey would eventually require.

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• 5. The Northeastern Caribbean

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  A weather station on Barbuda recorded a 160 mph gust and a pressure of 916.1 millibars as the eyewall passed, then went quiet. Downed phone lines cut the island off from its neighbors for hours. That afternoon, Prime Minister Gaston Browne flew over it by helicopter and saw an island that was effectively uninhabitable. Irma damaged or destroyed 95 percent of the structures there, including the hospital, the schools and both hotels. Property damage ran between 150 and 300 million dollars, and three people died.

  Barbuda's wildlife was a worry too. Fewer than 2,000 Barbuda warblers existed before the storm, and the island's only endemic bird remained unaccounted for until, within a few months, researchers confirmed that most had survived. Codrington Lagoon, home to about 2,500 nesting pairs of magnificent frigatebirds, was flooded by the surge. Antigua, just outside the strongest winds, lost roofs, fences and trees, and three people were treated for minor injuries.

  On the morning of the 6th of September, the center crossed Saint Martin. On the French side, the marinas around Marigot filled with boats smashed into one another. A hotel caught fire, but impassable roads kept firefighters away, and another hotel lost nearly its whole ground floor. Four people died and 50 were injured. As many as 95 percent of the buildings were damaged, and 60 percent of those were completely uninhabitable. Total losses exceeded 3.5 billion euros.

  The Dutch half, Sint Maarten, fared no better. Winds lifted vehicles "as if they were matches", and chunks of Princess Juliana International Airport's terminal lay across the runway. About 70 percent of the houses were demolished or severely damaged. Four people died and 23 were injured. The storm is considered the worst natural disaster in the island's history, with damages of 2.5 billion euros.

  The eyewall also swept Anguilla on the 6th of September. Many homes and schools were destroyed, the only hospital was badly damaged, and about 90 percent of the roads were impassable. One person died. In the British Virgin Islands, Tortola bore the brunt. Four people died, the surge swallowed bars and a gas station along Cane Garden Bay, and the mansion of Richard Branson on Necker Island was destroyed. Governor Gus Jaspert, sworn in only 13 days earlier, declared a state of emergency, the first in the territory's history. Restoring electricity there took about five months.

  In the United States Virgin Islands, Saint Thomas received at least 12 inches of rain. Flooding from roof leaks forced staff at Charlotte Amalie's hospital to relocate patients from the third and fourth floors. Three deaths were attributed to the storm on that island. Saint John lost its ferry, cargo and airport access, and without Saint Thomas power it had no electricity. Across the three islands, damage reached at least 1.1 billion dollars.

  On Saint Barthélemy, one local compared the scene to "a bomb that burned all vegetation", while another said the hurricane had "erased the island from the map". Streets in the capital, Gustavia, became rivers that carried off vehicles and furniture. The fire station took in up to 6.4 feet of water. French insurers faced 1.2 billion euros in losses across Saint-Martin and Saint Barts, making it one of the costliest natural disasters in France in 50 years. An analysis published on the 30th of January 2018 revealed that an anemometer on Saint Barthélemy had recorded an unofficial gust of 199 mph before it failed.

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• 6. Cuba, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico

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  At 7:30 p.m. local time on the 7th of September, Irma reached the Turks and Caicos Islands. The eye passed just south of the main islands, over South Caicos and the Ambergris Cays, while the winds on its northern side swept every island for more than two hours. On Providenciales, Minister of Infrastructure Goldray Ewing said the northwestern neighborhood of Blue Hill was "gone". On South Caicos, 75 percent of roofs were lost. Damage was estimated at over 500 million dollars.

  The eye then passed over Duncan Town on the Ragged Islands chain in the Bahamas on the 8th of September, and almost directly over Inagua and South Acklins. On Great Inagua, 70 percent of homes lost part of their roofs, and the school lost its roof entirely. The Morton Salt Company's production facility, one of the country's major employers, suffered millions of dollars in damage. Later, on the 10th of September, the storm's outer bands spawned tornadoes on Grand Bahama and Bimini. Losses across the Bahamas reached 135 million dollars.

  In Cuba, the strongest official sustained wind was 124 mph near Camila, in Ciego de Ávila Province, where a gust of 159 mph was also recorded. Waves at Cayo Romano rose above 26 feet, and storm surge pushed 1.2 miles inland in parts of Villa Clara Province. Topes de Collantes received 23.9 inches of rain. In all, 158,554 homes were damaged, 14,657 of them destroyed, and 980 health facilities and 2,264 schools were hit. Roughly 3.1 million people had their water supply disrupted. The cost of 13.185 billion dollars made Irma the costliest tropical cyclone in Cuban history, though only 10 people died.

  On Cayo Coco, the storm struck a major colony of American flamingos. Early reports said several hundred birds were killed, while other estimates ran as high as several thousand. Along the coast, the one-story homes of Caibarién were flooded as waves rolled through town. In the city of Santa Clara, 39 buildings collapsed, and in Havana the flooding around the Malecón surpassed that of the Storm of the Century in 1993 and Hurricane Wilma in 2005.

  Puerto Rico stayed north of the eye but still suffered. A gust of 111 mph hit the island of Culebra, and about 1.1 million of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority's 1.5 million customers lost power. Bayamón collected 13.04 inches of rain, seven rivers reached flood stage, and in rural Loíza 79 homes were destroyed. Damage was attributed at about 1 billion dollars. The storm killed three people there according to the National Hurricane Center, though a fourth death was connected to it. One man fell from his ladder while repairing his roof before the storm arrived. Governor Ricardo Rosselló declared Culebra and Vieques disaster areas.

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• 7. Florida and the Southeast

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  The highest sustained wind in Florida was 112 mph on Marco Island, and a gust of 142 mph was observed near Naples. Forecasters believed gusts of 150 to 160 mph had likely occurred in the Middle Florida Keys. More than 7.7 million homes and businesses lost electricity at some point, roughly 73 percent of the state. When Governor Scott toured the aftermath, he said "I thought we would see more damage" on the mainland, though he saw devastation in the Keys. President Trump wrote that the damage in some places was "far greater than anyone thought".

  The Keys had taken the worst of it. A surge of about 10 feet hit Cudjoe Key, where Irma came ashore, and winds and flooding broke buildings, trailer parks, boats, roads and the supply of power, phone service, water and fuel across the island chain. On Big Pine Key, 473 homes were completely destroyed. Across Monroe County, 27,649 homes were damaged, and 1,179 of them were destroyed.

  Farther north, Collier County lost 65 homes in its unincorporated areas, 44 of them mobile homes, and Lee County counted more than 24,000 damaged homes. In Hendry County, home to more citrus trees than any other Florida county, about 60 percent of the orange crop was lost. In Orange County, a gust of 91 mph was recorded at the top of the Disney Contemporary Resort. Along the Gulf Coast north of the landfall, the surge went negative, and the water pulled away from shore instead of rushing in.

  The east coast saw a different story. Along the St. Johns River in Duval County, water rose above the record set by Hurricane Dora in 1964, and about 350 people were rescued in Jacksonville's downtown, Riverside and San Marco areas. Water reached about 5 feet high in some homes.

  The human toll was heaviest in Broward County, with 21 deaths, among them 12 residents of a Hollywood nursing home who died from sweltering heat after the air conditioning failed. Across the United States, at least 92 people died, 10 directly and 82 indirectly, with 84 of them in Florida. Damage reached at least 50 billion dollars. That made Irma the costliest hurricane in Florida history, until Hurricane Ian surpassed it five years later.

  Storm surge reached Georgia, where Tybee Island and St. Simons Island flooded and three people died from falling trees and debris. In Charleston, South Carolina, the surge reached about 10 feet, the third highest on record.

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• 8. After the Wind

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  Cuba, itself badly hurt, sent 750 health workers to Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, The Bahamas, Dominica and Haiti. Wrecked roads, harbors and airports had blocked the first deliveries, so the British, Dutch, French and American governments sent warships and aircraft. Dutch King Willem-Alexander and French president Emmanuel Macron visited quickly. In Puerto Rico, residents and officials delivered help and evacuated people stranded on other islands. By the 10th of September, the main island was sheltering 1,200 tourists from Saint Martin and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

  Britain's response was named Operation Ruman and cost 32 million pounds. It sent nearly 500 military personnel, along with the first deployment of No. 38 Expeditionary Air Wing. RFA Mounts Bay arrived off Anguilla with helicopters, 40 marines and army engineers. Prime Minister Theresa May pledged another 25 million pounds on the 13th of September. Even so, politicians criticized the preparations and response as inadequate, and Anguilla's Chief Minister, Victor Banks, said the financial commitment was not substantial enough.

  In Saint Martin, hunger and thirst led to reports of violence, scavenging and theft. France raised its deployment to 2,200 troops, and the Dutch government sent more than 600 military and police personnel. Meanwhile the Dutch military airlifted dialysis patients off Sint Maarten, and the U.S. military evacuated 435 students and faculty of the American University of the Caribbean.

  In the U.S. Virgin Islands, the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp arrived by the 7th of September. Governor Kenneth Mapp called the storm a "horrific disaster" and warned there would be no restoration in days or weeks. On Saint John, it took six days to establish a disaster zone, and there was still no electricity in the middle of October. Five months afterward, two-thirds of the hospital beds on Saint Thomas remained unavailable.

  Haiti saw at least 5,000 homes flooded, and fears of cholera grew as contaminated floodwater sat in Cap-Haïtien, Ouanaminthe and Gonaives. Officials said losses were greater than they could have been because people largely ignored early warnings. In the Dominican Republic, more than 422,000 people were left without water after 28 aqueducts were damaged.

  On Ragged Island in the Bahamas, officials could not physically reach the island for days. When they did, they declared it uninhabitable. Prime Minister Hubert Minnis said it was the worst disaster area he or his officials had ever seen, and that all remaining residents would have to leave, potentially permanently. Business leaders soon called for a new long-term development model that would shift people away from such sparsely settled islands.

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