Devastation in the Caribbean as Hurricane Irma Heads Toward Miami<br />Two residents from St. Martin island’s two nations, the French St. Martin and the Dutch St. Maarten, describe Irma’s destruction.<br />“Help will arrive tonight,” she said, “but for the moment, they don’t have anything.”<br />The nearby island of St. Barthélemy, another French territory, was also hard hit, as<br />was Barbuda, where half of the island’s residents were reportedly left homeless.<br />Among the deepest concerns of Mr. McKendrick, the Anguilla attorney general, was the approach of Hurricane Jose, declared<br />a Category 3 storm on Thursday, which is expected to make its way through this same part of the Caribbean on Saturday.<br />A Hurricane Watch was in effect for Antigua and Barbuda<br />and a Tropical Storm watch was issued for Anguilla, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Nevis, Saba and St. Eustatius<br />On St. Martin, a part-French, part-Dutch possession where at least four people died as a result of the storm,<br />aerial footage taken by the military showed streets inundated with water and homes devastated by winds.<br />“There are shipwrecks everywhere, destroyed houses everywhere, torn-off roofs everywhere,” the president<br />of the French territorial council on St. Martin, Daniel Gibbs, told Radio Caraïbes International.<br />Government officials in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina pleaded for people to evacuate vulnerable areas, triggering a scramble for the essentials — gasoline, water, sandbags — that, even for hurricane-hardened Floridians, was laced with dread<br />and punctuated with dire warnings from every direction.
