THE ANGELS OF Irma
A HURRICANE IS A MONSTER WITH TWO ORDERS of magnitude. It is a weapon of mass destruction—an atmospheric daisy cutter that descends on a region and claws away whole cities at a time. And it’s a precision-targeted weapon too—a disturbance that begins in the sky, travels across an ocean and, when it arrives, picks off its victims one at a time: the child swept under by the onrushing flood, the first responder who saves a life and perishes in the process.
Hurricane Irma inflicted both kinds of horror. In the Caribbean, the storm carpet-bombed islands that have few if any defenses. It damaged or destroyed more than 90% of the structures on both Barbuda and St. Martin. It wrecked more than 130 schools across multiple islands including Anguilla, the Virgin Islands and Turks and Caicos, affecting 2.4 million children. It shuttered hospitals, made food scarce, demolished infrastructure.
More intimately, there were the individual losses of individual souls. At least eight people from a Broward County nursing home died after the facility was left without power for days after Irma. Three people in a single home died of carbon-monoxide poisoning from a generator they were using when the power failed. Another Florida man was killed when high winds blew him off his ladder as he tried to put storm protection over windows.
In all, Irma has so far claimed at least 30 people in the U.S. and at least 44 people across the Caribbean, though the number will surely go up as the floodwaters recede. And yet the undeniable fact is that things could have been worse—much worse. Irma was the most powerful hurricane recorded in the open Atlantic in the satellite era: it spent a record three consecutive days as a Category 5 storm and maintained wind speeds of at least 185 m.p.h. (298 km/h) for a record
