Hurricane Irma may inflict $200bn damage to US

Bloomberg

Hurricane Irma headed for an all-but-certain collision with southern Florida after devastating the Caribbean islands and swiping at Cuba as it threatens to become the most expensive storm in US history.
While top winds dropped to 130 miles (209 kilometres) an hour, the life-threatening storm’s swollen size means most of Florida will face hurricane-force winds as it cuts a path through the peninsula into Georgia. Irma, still a Category 4-class storm after it raked the Camaguey archipelago in Cuba at Category 5 strength, was expected to hit the Florida Keys on Sunday morning and head to the state’s southwestern coast that afternoon, the US National Hurricane Center said early.
“Irma is forecast to restrengthen once it moves away from Cuba, and Irma isexpected to remain a powerful hurricane as it approaches Florida,” the NHC said.
The storm has already left at least 22 people dead, thousands homeless across the Caribbean and threatens to rack up as much as $200 billion in damages.
“Much of Florida, especially the southern half, is in for a really long and horrible day on Sunday,” said Todd Crawford, lead meteorologist at The Weather Company in Andover, Massachusetts. Another example of “the power of nature on a heavily populated part of the US coastline is imminent, and the costs will be great.”
Mandatory evacuations were issued across Florida, with around 650,000 people fleeing Miami-Dade as part of the largest evacuation the county has ever attempted. The state’s Department of Emergency Management estimated that 5.6 million people in the state have been ordered to leave their homes, Governor Rick Scott said. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate was evacuated, along with the rest of Palm Beach.
“Prepare for the worst possible,” Trump said as he boarded Marine One, bound for Camp David.
Irma is one of three tropical systems churning in the region. Jose, the third major one of the 2017 season, weakened a little but remained a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds as strong as 145 miles per hour.
Katia weakened to a tropical depression near the Sierra Madre mountains after making landfall in Mexico as a Category 1 hurricane, the NHC said in its latest advisory. The country was struck by a powerful earthquake, shaking buildings in the capital and triggering a tsunami warning.
Irma’s hurricane-force winds now extend for 140 miles, creating a danger zone that could reach from West Palm Beach on the Atlantic coast to Fort Myers on the Gulf of Mexico. That’s an “insurance industry nightmare” as every county in the state could see damaged roofs and power outages so vast it overwhelms repair efforts, said Chuck Watson, a Savannah, Georgia-based disaster modeler with Enki Research.
Damage could easily top $135 billion in Florida, with other economic losses pushing the price tag as high as $200 billion, Watson said. Preliminary estimates show losses across the Caribbean nearing $10 billion. CoreLogic said 8.5 million properties in Florida may be damaged by Irma’s winds.
Total losses from Katrina reached $160 billion in 2017 dollars after it slammed into New Orleans in 2005. “Wind damage is totally going to throw a wrench into the insurance industry,” Watson said. “You are talking about companies failing.”
About 9 million of Florida’s 20.6 million people may lose power, according to the state’s largest utility Florida Power & Light Co.
Irma may also curb natural gas demand in one of the largest US markets and threaten $1.2 billion worth of crops.

New Yorkers brace for
hurricane Irma in Miami

Bloomberg

Workers at the grand Faena Hotel Miami Beach prepared for Hurricane Irma’s fury.
Their unusual assignment: fortify the four layers of bullet-proof glass encasing a gilded, 24-karat mammoth skeleton sculpture that cost a cool $17 million. Like the fantasy-world Faena, the life-size Damien Hirst work, now sheathed in a protective cocoon of materials including steel pylons, is a monument to the wealth that enveloped Miami as it grew into what someone once dubbed New York’s sixth borough.
As thousands streamed northward along Interstate 95 to escape Irma, the city was confronting a reckoning after an era of rapid development that transformed it into an international center of business and culture. The massive flow of money that first began to pour in during the 1990s, the Madonna era of South Beach, came with a dearth of proper drainage and storm-hardened power grids, roads and bridges.
Since 2011, more than 400 luxury condo towers have gone up across an area perched precariously between beach and swamp. Next to the hotel on the water, Faena House has lured financiers including Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Kenneth Griffin of Citadel LLC into plowing tens of millions of dollars into trophy condominiums. Now comes Irma, the mightiest storm to hit the area since Andrew in 1992, which left dozens dead in the state and caused it $23.5 billion of damage. Irma’s human and economic toll in Florida is as yet incalculable. But damage estimates run $130 billion.
The last major hurricane to strike the region was Wilma in 2005, and the Miami area’s population has grown 10 percent since 2010, so many residents are unfamiliar with the often convulsive weather. People filled sandbags, mobbed service stations until they ran out of gas and boarded up homes.