Irma Is Finally Dead; Some Parting Thoughts

A blown apart home in Naples, Florida after Irma.
Photo by Bryan Woolston/Reuters.

There's still some flooding going on in parts of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina this morning and millions of people are still without power, but what was once Hurricane Irma is dissipating over the northern Georgia and Alabama this morning.

It's interesting how the far southern and far northern parts of Irma's route though Florida and the Southeast seem to have had the worst effects of the storm.

That makes sense in the Florida Keys. After all, that's where Irma first came ashore in the United States.

But the storm had such a wide girth that it caused that record storm surge flood in Jacksonville, Florida and close to it in Charleston, South Carolina.

Some areas won't get electricity back for weeks. That's especially troublesome in Florida. Imagine enduring Florida's humidity for weeks with air conditioning. (The heat index in Miami yesterday, after the hurricane, was 103 degrees.)

I also hope there are some post-scripts. There were reports that a few employers were demanding employees either stay and not evacuate before the storm, or get right back to work or get in Big Trouble.

The manager at Jacksonville Pizza Hut told employees they had to work and could not evacuate until less than 24 hours before the storm. This despite the fact that everyone from Florida Gov. Rick Scott on down were telling people to evacuate early to avoid traffic jams, gas shortages and the storm itself.

We hope the manager at that Pizza Hut gets fired. (Pizza Hut corporate said the Jacksonville restaurant was not following company guidelines.)

I also want an update on management of a West Palm Beach apartment complex to not allow residents to board up windows ahead of the storm, despite the fact the complex had a bunch of storm shutters in storage.

The apartment complex management would not talk to media, but here's my theory: It was an insurance scam: My conspiracy mind says the apartment management wanted severe damage to the structure, then they would get an insurance write-off, then rebuild nicer so they could charge higher rents to subsequent tenants.

I hope someone finds out what was really going on.

These are all small aspects of a big story, a big storm. I guess there's so many moving parts, you've got to look at the trees, not the whole forest.

On another subject, forecasters are still watching Hurricane Jose out in the Atlantic. It's performing all these weird loop de loops out there. It seems like the majority of forecasts eventually take Jose out to sea and away from the United States, but a few computer models place it along the East Coast in about a week.

I'm not terribly alarmed about Jose at this point, but it's worth keeping our eyes on.

Here are some videos. The first shows the flooding in Charleston, South Carolina:



Here's a video from the Associated Press of the relentless storm surge coming into Jacksonville, Florida;



StormChasingVideo was out on the Florida Keys when Irma landfall and they came back with this video:


Finally, watch the first half of this video: Seth Meyers says everything about the hurricane that I wanted to. (The second half of the video is all politics, go ahead and watch if you want, but in the first half, Meyers nails it on Irma: