Shortly after Tampa Bay’s water was sucked up by Hurricane Irma, a drone operator captured people walking in the bay—a pretty dangerous move. Officials on Sunday warned people to stay away.
Earlier on Sunday, there were reports and videos posted to social media showing Tampa Bay’s waters being pushed out of the harbor, leaving puddles, sludge, and some muddy land.
“The worrisome part will be later when the winds start pushing the water back,” Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean was quoted as saying, indicating that people who are walking out in Tampa Bay should be wary of doing so.
“ALERT: Water surrounding Tampa Bay is very low due to the storm. It is dangerous to be walking out there,” Alert Tampa—the City of Tampa from the Office of Emergency Management’s Twitter account—posted Sunday.
Officials have warned that a storm surge could reach 3 to 8 feet around Tampa.
Hurricane Irma is predicted to hit Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg, Sarasota, and outlying areas on Sunday evening.
Currently, the Category 3 storm is slamming Naples, Marco Island, and outlying areas.
Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn declared a curfew for Tampa that is effective as of 6 p.m. Sunday, which means “all residents need to be indoors,” Alert Tampa said.
Regarding Irma, Buckhorn on Saturday made a blunt warning: “We’re about to get punched in the face.”
It’s not the first time Irma sucked up water. On Saturday, a person spotted the same phenomenon in the Bahamas, showing the ocean floor totally exposed.
A weakening but still potent Hurricane Irma lashed Florida’s Gulf Coast on Sunday with tree-bending winds, pounding rain and surging surf, leaving more than 2.6 million homes and businesses without power statewide while flooding streets and swaying skyscrapers in Miami.
Forecasters warned that Irma remained extremely dangerous as the monster storm toppled trees and power lines, peeled tiles off roofs and threatened coastal areas with storm surges of up to 15 feet (4.6 m). Tornadoes were also spotted through the southern part of the state.
Hours after barreling across the resort archipelago of the Florida Keys, the storm crept up the western shore of the Florida Peninsula to make a second landfall at Marco Island around 3.35 p.m. (1935 GMT), about a dozen miles (19 km) south of the upscale beach town of Naples on the Gulf of Mexico.
Irma’s center came ashore not long after it was downgraded to a Category 3 storm from a Category 4 on the five-point Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, with maximum sustained winds of 120 miles per hour (195 kph).
A few hours later, it was downgraded again to Category 2, with maximum sustained wind gusts of 110 mph (175 kph), the National Hurricane Center reported in Miami.
Some 6.5 million people, about a third of the state’s population, had been ordered to evacuate southern Florida as the storm approached. An estimated 170,000 people were lodged in some 650 emergency shelters as of early evening, according to the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
“This is a life-threatening situation,” Governor Rick Scott told a news conference. Curfews were declared on Sunday evening for the Gulf Coast cities of Tampa and St. Petersburg as several Florida counties reported arrests of looters taking advantage of homes left vacant by evacuations.
The storm killed at least 28 people as it raged through the Caribbean en route to Florida. On Sunday, Irma claimed its first U.S. fatality – a man found dead in a pickup truck that had crashed into a tree in high winds in the town of Marathon, in the Keys.
The storm’s westward tilt as it advanced on Florida put a string of Gulf Coast cities at greatest risk and spared the densely populated Miami area the full force of its wrath. The state’s biggest city, situated about 100 miles (160 km) east of Irma’s core, was anything but unscathed.
Miami apartment towers swayed in the high winds, two construction cranes were toppled, and small white-capped waves could be seen in flooded streets between Miami office towers.
Last week, Irma ranked as one of the most powerful hurricanes ever documented in the Atlantic, one of only a handful of Category 5 storms known to have packed sustained winds at 185 mph (297 kph)or more.
Before turning on Florida, the storm pummeled Cuba with 36-foot-tall (11-m) waves after ravaging several smaller Caribbean islands.
Its core was about 5 miles (8 km) north of Naples by 5 p.m. (2100 GMT) and was expected to move along or over Florida’s western coast through evening.
Irma is expected to cause billions of dollars in damage to the third-most-populous U.S. state, a major tourism hub with an economy that generates about 5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
At least 2.6 million Florida homes and businesses had lost power, according to Florida Power & Light and other utilities.
From The Epoch Times