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Hurricane Irma: What’s Happened and What’s Next - The New York Times

posted onSeptember 8, 2017
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Article snippet: Hurricane Irma made landfall this week in the Caribbean as one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. Here is a guide to The New York Times’s coverage of the Category 5 storm as it sweeps toward Florida. For dispatches from journalists across the region, see our live briefing with up to the minute developments. For an overview, see this story. On Wednesday, Irma struck land for the first time, hitting the island of Barbuda with winds of up to 185 miles per hour. It passed over St. Martin and Anguilla as it headed west, leaving a path of destruction, as seen in this vivid footage: Puerto Rico was largely unscathed, but most of its households lost power. The storm was expected to reach South Florida this weekend, according to our hurricane path tracker. Hurricane Irma’s trajectory is by far the most important question facing forecasters right now, but its intensity is a concern as well. The Upshot explained how experts are gathering data on the storm’s strength. With good forecasting, government officials can brace for the worst. We are covering the way Florida is preparing for evacuations, power losses and recovery efforts. The state has a long history of hurricanes, as highlighted in this article about Hurricane Andrew, which struck in 1992. (One of our reporters wrote a gripping first-person account last year about what it was like to ride out that storm.) But Irma’s destruction could be particularly devastating because there has been so much new develo... Link to the full article to read more

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