Hurriance Irma batters Florida with high winds, heavy rain

6.5 mn people, about a third of state's population, had been ordered to evacuate southern Florida

Hurricane Irma bore down on southern Florida on Sunday with 130 mile-per-hour (210 kph) winds, flooding Miami streets and knocking out power to more than 1.6 million homes and businesses.

Even before it came ashore, Florida was feeling Irma’s fury with at least one man killed, a woman forced to deliver her own baby and trees and apartment towers swaying in high winds.

The storm was one of the most powerful ever seen in the Atlantic and has already killed two dozen people in the Caribbean and pummelled Cuba with 36-foot (11 meter) waves on Sunday. Its core was located about 50 miles (105 km) south of Naples by midday.

Some 6.5 million people, about a third of the state’s population, had been ordered to evacuate southern Florida.

Officials warned that Irma’s heavy storm surge - seawater driven on land by high winds — could bring floods of up to 15 feet (4.6 m) along the state’s western Gulf Coast. It submerged the highway that connects the isolated Florida Keys archipelago with the mainland and small white-capped waves could be seen in flooded streets between Miami office towers.

“There is a serious threat of significant storm surge flooding along the entire west coast of Florida,” Governor Rick Scott told a press conference. “This is a life-threatening situation.”

Irma is expected to cause billions of dollars in damage to the third-most-populous US state, a major tourism hub with an economy comprising about 5 per cent of US gross domestic product.

At least 1.6 million Florida homes and businesses had lost power, according to Florida Power & Light and other utilities.

The National Hurricane Centre forecast that its centre eye will move near or over the state’s west coast later on Sunday.

The count of people killed by the storm in the Caribbean rose to 24 on Sunday with two new deaths reported on the Dutch portion of Saint Martin. Irma has already claimed at least one life in Florida after a man’s body was pulled from his pickup truck, which had crashed into a tree in high winds.