First Run News

CLEWISTON, Fla.

JUCHITÁN DE ZARAGOZA, Mexico — Under the glare of portable floodlights and the flashlights that some held, men in sweat-soaked jumpsuits dug into a hillock of rubble in this town, the night after the largest earthquake to hit Mexico in a century flattened buildings here and across southern Mexico. Atop the mound of debris, the men at times moved like archaeologists, sifting with bare, dirt-encrusted hands, chunk by concrete chunk.

Since Wednesday, Hurricane Irma has pummeled a chain of Caribbean islands and set a course for Florida, leaving at least 20 people dead. Photographers on the ground have documented the effects of the storm, including leveled neighborhoods, crowded shelters, flooded streets and the caravan of cars moving up the Florida coast as millions of people left their homes.

NAPLES, Fla. — Pedro Cruz, a maintenance worker at Temple Shalom, was already taking shelter there with his family when he got a call from his supervisor on Saturday afternoon. Situated east of Interstate 75, the temple was a safe distance from the potential storm surge of Hurricane Irma. The supervisor told Mr. Cruz to expect visitors.

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Engineers stopped releasing water from Lake Okeechobee on Saturday, confident that they had lowered levels enough to keep the dike and the towns around it safe as Hurricane Irma swept into southern Florida. But the dike, built seven decades ago and named for Herbert Hoover, was not the only major piece of Florida infrastructure that had officials concerned as the hurricane approached.

ATLANTA — At 8:06 on Friday morning, Nora Zimmett had a minor crisis on her hands. Ms. Zimmett, the senior vice president of programming for the Weather Channel, was in the control room here, monitoring the network’s rolling coverage of Hurricane Irma. The newsroom surrounding her was bathed in red lighting to signal that the network was in “severe mode,” and enormous screens displayed the powerful storm in swirling black and pink satellite imagery. But Ms.

Hurricane Irma, one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded, is bearing down on Florida. The Times, which has journalists deployed through the region, is providing free digital access to all storm news. For the latest up-to-the-minute dispatches, read this live Saturday briefing. Here is a general overview of the news.

POINTE-À-PITRE, Guadeloupe — As communications started to be restored to the storm-ravaged islands of the Caribbean, five deaths were reported from the British Virgin Islands, raising the toll across the Caribbean to 25 people as the islands braced for yet another storm set to strike as early as Saturday afternoon. The new hurricane, Jose, is expected to wreak less damage than Hurricane Irma, whose passage through the eastern Caribbean left a wake of destruction that could take years to settle, leveling 90 percent of the buildings on some islands.

Hurricane Irma gained strength early Sunday as it bore down on the Florida Keys, with officials upgrading it to a Category 4 storm and reporting maximum sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. The hurricane’s eye was expected to cross the Lower Florida Keys during the next several hours, the National Hurricane Center said at 2 a.m. Irma had been downgraded to a Category 3 storm as it churned toward Florida on Saturday, after leaving a trail of death and destruction across the Caribbean.

MIAMI — After plowing a path of destruction through the Caribbean and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee in one of the largest evacuations in American history, Hurricane Irma began to maul southern Florida on Saturday and was poised to howl up its west coast Sunday with deadly force and fury. The time to gather supplies was over, and in most of the region, it was getting too late to run. The Florida Keys faced a potentially catastrophic brew of winds reaching 130 miles an hour and a storm surge that threatened to drown whole islands.