Police evacuated 115 residents on Wednesday from the facility, whose air conditioning was cut by the storm.

Broward County Mayor Barbara Sharief said three were found dead at the nursing home in the city of Hollywood. Three others died in hospital.

Ten million people are still without power in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas after Hurricane Irma.

The storm – which has claimed more than two dozen lives in the US – struck southwestern Florida on Sunday morning as a category four hurricane before weakening to a tropical depression on Monday.

Irma earlier left a trail of destruction in the Caribbean, where nearly 40 people were killed.

Hollywood Police Chief Tomas Sanchez said the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills facility has been sealed off and police are conducting a criminal investigation.

State investigators from the Florida Office of Attorney General were also at the scene, city officials said in a statement.

“It may be related to a loss of power in the storm,” he said, adding that officers were checking in on 42 other assisted living facilities and nursing homes throughout the city.

Hollywood Fire Rescue found several patients “in varying degree of medical distress and immediately began treatment” when they arrived at the Hollywood Hills facility on Wednesday morning, according to the city’s statement.

Some residents there awoke sick, the Miami Herald reported.

Kitchen worker Jean Lindor told the newspaper a generator allowed staff to cook but did not provide the facility with air conditioning.

Temperatures on Tuesday in Hollywood reached 32C (90F), according to the National Weather Service.

The Florida Health Care Association called the deaths a “profound tragedy within the larger tragedy of Hurricane Irma”.

The facility is not the only Florida nursing home that has been left without power by Irma.

An estimated 150 facilities out of the nearly 700 in the state are currently without full power services, the association said.

The group said it was working with officials to prioritise “the locations with the greatest need”.

More than half of a large retirement community in Pembroke Pines, Florida, still had no electricity by Wednesday morning, leaving elderly residents stuck in rooms with no access to lifts.

Pembroke Pines police spokeswoman Amanda Conwell told the Miami Herald that officers were at the scene.

She said some of the 15,000 residents at Century Village were vulnerable and “we are concerned about their welfare”.

Another assisted care facility for dementia patients in Fort Myers, Florida, went without power for three days after Hurricane Irma as elderly patients suffered in the rising heat.

Cape Coral Shores kept 20 patients during the storm as part of an agreement with authorities because local emergency shelters had been evacuated as Irma bore down on the coast.

Florida residents are still returning from shelters to their households to count the cost of Irma’s destruction.

Authorities say preliminary estimates suggest 25% of the homes in the Florida Keys were destroyed and 65% sustained major damage.

US President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit the hard-hit Florida city of Naples on Thursday to view the damage, US media have reported.

It will be his third trip related to hurricanes in two weeks and he will be joined by his wife Melania, the first lady.

What’s happening in the Caribbean?

Of the nearly 40 people killed by Irma in the Caribbean, victims include 10 dead on the French island of St Barts and on the French part of St Martin – which is shared with the Netherlands.

In the Dutch territory of St Maarten, about 90% of buildings were damaged and a third destroyed, the Dutch Red Cross said.

Critics have accused France, the UK and Netherlands of not doing enough to help hurricane victims in their overseas territories.

French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to swiftly rebuild the French Caribbean islands.

The UK announced it would give an additional $33m (£25m) of funding to help with the recovery effort.

At least 10 people were killed when Irma hit Cuba as a category five hurricane, the island nation’s worst hurricane death toll since 16 died in Hurricane Dennis in 2005.

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Source: BBC

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Entry is being restricted to residents and business owners as work continues to clear roads and check the state of bridges linking the islands.

Nearly 6.9 million homes were without power in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama.

Irma, which has since rapidly weakened, is being linked to 11 deaths in the US.

Why was Florida spared worst of Irma?
Seven people died in Florida, three in Georgia and one in South Carolina, according to US media.

The storm also left a trail of destruction in the Caribbean, where at least 37 people were killed.

French President Emmanuel Macron has arrived in the region and is to visit devastated French islands, while UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson is heading to the British Virgin Islands.

Both France and Britain have been criticised for not doing enough to help their nationals in overseas territories affected by the hurricane.

Dutch King Willem-Alexander spent Monday night on the Dutch side of St Martin, an island shared between France and the Netherlands.

The Dutch royal told the NOS public newscaster: “I have seen proper war as well as natural disasters before, but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Florida Governor Rick Scott used the same word – “devastation” – after flying over the Keys on Monday.

“I just hope everybody survived,” he said. “It’s horrible what we saw.”

“We saw a lot of boats washed ashore and we saw any, basically, any trailer park there overturned.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates one in four homes in the Keys has been destroyed and that 60% were damaged.
Thousands of people ignored calls to evacuate last week, and clung on in the dangerously exposed islands during the storm.
However, Governor Scott added: “I didn’t see the damage I thought I would see.” Storm surges had turned out to be “not as bad as we thought”, he said.

Teams are still working to clear Highway 1, the road connecting most of the inhabited islands, and bridge inspections are continuing.

Some residents were allowed into the towns of Key Largo, Tavernier and Islamorada on Tuesday morning, authorities in Monroe Country said.

They were warned that services on the islands were limited: most areas were still without power and water, mobile phone signals were patchy and most petrol stations were still closed.

The US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has arrived off Florida and other navy ships were in the area on Tuesday to help distribute food to the Keys and evacuate residents.

In Jacksonville, Mayor Lenny Curry said 356 people had to be rescued amid record-high storm surges and flooding, the Florida Times-Union reported.

A Jacksonville Pizza Hut sparked online backlash after a manager threatened to punish employees who evacuated too early for Irma.

“You cannot evacuate Friday for a Tuesday storm event!” the restaurant’s manager told employees in a notice, which was shared online.

Jacksonville officials began ordering a mandatory evacuation for parts of the city on Friday.

In a statement, Pizza Hut said the manager who posted the notice did not follow company guidelines.

Other parts of the state escaped the storm lightly compared to the Caribbean islands.

“The storm surge flooding in Miami is a mere fraction of what would have happened if the core of the storm had been further east,” Rick Knabb, former director of the National Hurricane Center, said in a tweet.

Returning to her home in Miami’s Little Haiti neighbourhood, evacuee Melida Hernandez, 67, found her home split down the middle by a tree.

“I wanted to cry, but this is what it is, this is life,” she told Reuters news agency.

President Donald Trump has released emergency federal aid for Florida, describing the hurricane as a “big monster”.
The storm was downgraded as it moved north towards Atlanta, Georgia, with maximum sustained winds of 35mph (56km/h) recorded, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in a statement.

Another hurricane, Jose, has been weakening over the western Atlantic, with swells due to affect parts of Hispaniola (the island split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic), the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, later this week.

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Source: BBC

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Relief operations are under way and engineers are working to restore power, but many areas remain stranded.

The islands of the Florida Keys and western parts of the US state bore the brunt of the category-four hurricane.

Irma hit Florida on Sunday and weakened to a tropical storm before becoming a tropical depression early on Tuesday.

The storm was downgraded as it moved north towards Atlanta, with maximum sustained winds of 56km/h (35mph) later recorded, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said in a statement.

The NHC statement added that while heavy rain was expected to continue across south-eastern states, all storm surge and tropical storm warnings had been discontinued.

Media reports link at least four deaths to the storm in Florida. Last week it killed at least 37 people in Caribbean islands.

White House Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert said it will be some time before residents in the Florida Keys are able to return to their homes.

“I would expect that the Keys are not fit for re-entry for regular citizenry for weeks”, he said.

Speaking as he went on an aerial tour of the Keys, Florida Governor Rick Scott said: “Power lines are down throughout the state. We’ve got roads that are impassable, so everybody’s got to be patient as we work through this.”

The Keys are cut off from the mainland, as the 42 bridges that link them are being assessed for damage. Reports say that 10,000 people decided to ride out the storm.

At 18:00 GMT, its centre had moved into southern Georgia, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.

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Source: BBC

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Irma made landfall on Marco Island off Florida’s west coast with winds of up to 120mph (192km/h), but has since been downgraded from category three to two.

More than 3.4 million homes in the state are without power, and parts of the city of Miami are under water.

Three storm-related deaths have been reported, as Irma moves northwards.

In its latest update at 03:00 GMT Monday, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) says “hurricane conditions are continuing across portions of the central Florida peninsula”.

Irma currently has maximum sustained winds of 100mph (160km/h), the NHC says.

The storm was earlier pummelling the area around the city of Fort Myers.

Irma has already devastated parts of the Caribbean, killing at least 28 people.

Some 6.3 million people in Florida had been told to evacuate.

President Donald Trump has approved a major disaster declaration and emergency federal aid for Florida.

He described the hurricane as a “big monster”, praising the federal agencies involved with the storm and saying he would go to the state “very soon”.

“We may have been a little bit lucky in that it went on the west, and it may not have been quite as disruptive, but we’re going to see, it’s going to play out over the next five or six hours,” Mr Trump added.

Where is the storm now?

At 03:00 GMT, the centre of the hurricane was about 50 miles (80km) south-east of the city of Tampa.

Some 3m people live in the Tampa Bay area. The region has not been hit by a major hurricane since 1921.

Irma is now losing strength, the NHC says, predicting that Irma will become a tropical storm over “far northern Florida or southern Georgia on Monday”.

“On the forecast track, the centre of Irma will continue to move over the western Florida peninsula through Monday morning and then into the south-eastern United States late Monday and Tuesday.”

The storm made landfall at Marco Island at 15:35 local time (19:35 GMT).

The NHC earlier tweeted that people in the area of Naples and Marco Island should move away from the coast as storm surges of up to 15ft were possible.

How did it arrive in Florida?

After leaving the coast of Cuba, Irma barrelled through the Florida Keys, a chain of low-lying islands to the south, on Sunday morning.

Media reports say a man was killed on Saturday in the Keys when his truck crashed into a tree as the outer bands of the storm arrived.

The whole of the southern tip of Florida has seen high winds, driving rain and storm surges.

About 2ft (60cm) of water has been seen in Miami’s financial district, where one major street resembled a river, but the worst damage is expected on the west coast.

Two cranes have collapsed in high winds in the city.

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Source: BBC

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