As of 0000 GMT, the eye of the storm was just north of Puerto Rico and the hurricane was moving west-northwest at 16 miles per hour (26 kilometers per hour). Haiti's northern coast was on hurricane alert, although in the town of Cap-Haitien residents appeared mostly unaware of the impending storm. Irma follows hot on the heels of Hurricane Harvey which devastated swaths of Texas and Louisiana in late August. Irma was hitting the Caribbean even as two other tropical storms, Jose in the Atlantic Ocean and Katia in the Gulf of Mexico, were upgraded to hurricane status. Panicked residents stripped shelves bare in Miami as they rushed to stockpile everything from bottled water to sandbags before Irma strikes.

Source: The Nation Bangkok September 07, 2017 02:03 UTC