As coastal Florida residents discovered Sunday, one of the strangest side effects of Hurricane Irma was the way the storm drained seawaters away from shorelines, leaving huge mud flats behind where water used to be. In the partially drained Sarasota Bay, south of Tampa, residents spotted a pair of brown lumps out in the muddy flats. They were manatees, the peaceful, lumbering aquatic mammals that frequent Florida's waters. “We had to do something about it,” Tony Faradini-Campos of Sarasota told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. We were advised just to get out of the bay for our safety" before the storm waters came rushing back in.

Source: Los Angeles Times September 11, 2017 02:32 UTC