Hurricane Irma has killed at least 12 people as the dangerous Category 5 storm continued churning across the Caribbean early Thursday on a destructive path toward Florida.
The hurricane has so far slammed into Barbuda, Saint Martin and the British Virgin Islands, raked Puerto Rico with heavy wind as it swept nearby and was on a collision course with the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
At least eight people were killed and 23 injured in the French Caribbean island territories, French Interior Minister Gerard Collomb told radio Franceinfo on Thursday.
The death toll in Saint Martin — half of which is French and the other half Dutch — and Saint Barthelemy could be higher because rescue teams have yet to finish their inspections of the ravaged islands, he said.
“The reconnaissance will really start at daybreak,” Collomb said. “It’s a tragedy, we’ll need to rebuild both islands. Most of the schools have been destroyed.”
Daniel Gibbs, chairman of a local council on Saint Martin, told Radio Caribbean International that 95 percent of the island was destroyed.
“It is an enormous disaster,” he said. “I am in shock.”
The Dutch part of Saint Martin remained unreachable, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Thursday.
“Alas, the island is not reachable at this point because of the huge damage to the airport and the harbor,” Rutte told reporters.
Tiny Barbuda is a scene of “total carnage,” said Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne.
Nearly every building on the island was damaged when Irma’s core crossed almost directly over the island and about 60 percent of its roughly 1,400 residents were left homeless, Browne said.
“It is just really a horrendous situation,” said Browne, adding that a 2-year-old child was killed as a family tried to escape a damaged home during the storm.
One death also was reported in the nearby island of Anguilla, where officials reported major damage to the airport, hospitals, shelters and schools, according to the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency.
By early Thursday, the center of the storm was about 95 miles north of Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, and was moving west-northwest near 18 mph.
More than half of Puerto Rico was without power, leaving 900,000 in the dark and almost 50,000 without water, the US territory’s emergency management agency said.
The US National Hurricane Center predicted that Irma would remain at Category 4 or 5 as it passes just north of the Dominican Republic and Haiti on Thursday, nears the Turks & Caicos and parts of the Bahamas by Thursday night and skirts Cuba on Friday night.
It will then likely head north toward Florida, where officials expect it to hit sometime Sunday.
Sunshine State officials began evacuations in advance of Irma’s arrival, ordering tourists to leave the Keys. Evacuation of residents from the Keys began Wednesday evening.
Ed Rappaport, acting director of the Miami-based National Hurricane Center, told WFOR-TV that Irma was a “once-in-a-generation storm.”
Experts worried that the storm could rake the entire Florida east coast from Miami to Jacksonville and then head into Savannah, Georgia, and the Carolinas.
“This could easily be the most costly storm in US history, which is saying a lot considering what just happened two weeks ago,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, referring to Hurricane Harvey’s destruction in Texas and Louisiana.
Irma has produced sustained winds at 183 mph for more than 33 hours, making it the longest-lasting, top-intensity cyclone ever recorded, France’s national weather service said Thursday, Agence France-Presse said.
“Such an intensity, for such a long period, has never been observed in the satellite era,” which began in the early 1970s, said Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster at Meteo France. “And it is continuing.”
Meanwhile, two other hurricanes were spinning through the Atlantic basin.
Katia in the Gulf of Mexico posed no threat to the United States, according to US forecasters.
But Hurricane Jose, which was about 815 miles east of the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles islands, could eventually threaten the US mainland.
The storm activity comes after Harvey claimed about 60 lives and caused property damage estimated as high as $180 billion.
With Post wires