Florida

Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

Authored by Sarah Burris via RawStory.com,

Hurricane Harvey was a tragic nightmare that hit the Texas shores with force and then lingered for days, dumping truck-loads of rain on a city ill-equipped to handle it. Florida is next, and if predictions are accurate, Hurricane Irma is going to be far worse than Houston was, and worse than anyone has prepared for.

Irma is the kind of storm where you get thousands of lives lost. This is not going to be the big slow-motion flood like Harvey - this is a real, honest-to-God hurricane.

       - Chuck Watson, disaster modeler with Enki Research

Update 3: The Irma hits just keep on coming, with the NHC Atlantic Ops twitter page reporting that as of this moment, Irma is now the stronger hurricane in the Atlantic basin outside of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico in NHC records. “Preparations should be rushed to completion in the hurricane warning area,” the NHC said.

With the devastation of Harvey still fresh in the public’s memory, stores in southern Florida are already running out of necessities like bottled water, and the Mayor of Miami is telling reporters to expect an evacuation order on Wednesday. But outside of the US mainland, the US Virgin Islands, which has activated the national guard as the storm approaches. However, Mapp's order differed from the order signed by Texas Gov. Mike Abbott with one concerning twist: guardsmen can “appropriate” guns, ammunition, explosives and property needed to respond to Hurricane Irma.