Florida wakes up to assess damage as Hurricane Irma weakens and moves onto Georgia
Irma is moving towards Georgia and is expected to dump heavy rains over the coming day
Downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm, Irma left several northern Florida cities flooded and continued to batter them with heavy rain and high storm surges on Monday.
Once ranked one of the most powerful hurricanes recorded in the Atlantic, Irma hit vast sections of Florida through Sunday and into Monday. It first made landfall on the Florida Keys archipelago as a category 4 storm with winds up to 215km/h and then coming ashore south of Naples and heading up the west coast.
Weakening to tropical storm with sustained winds of up to 110km/h at 8am on Monday, Irma had moved to about 56km west of Gainesville and was headed up the coast, the National Hurricane Centre said.
As Irma travelled through the centre of the state, it brought wind gusts of up to 160km/h and torrential rain to areas around Orlando, the National Weather Service said. Much of the state’s east and west coasts, plus Georgia and parts of South Carolina were still vulnerable to storm surges and forecast to receive up to 41cm of rain as it passed over.
Authorities kept storm warnings in effect across vast swathes of the Florida peninsular, where more than six million people had been ordered to flee – one of the biggest evacuations in US history.
