Florida/Irma Relief Hurricane Irma evacuees began returning to the storm-ravaged Florida Keys on Tuesday to find homes ripped apart and businesses coated in seaweed amid a debris-strewn landscape where an estimated 25% of all dwellings were destroyed.
Destruction was widespread in the Keys, a resort island chain stretching southwest from the tip of the Florida Peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico and connected by a single, narrow highway and a series of bridges and causeways along a route of nearly 100 miles (160 km). “I don’t have a house. I don’t have a job. I have nothing,” said Mercedes Lopez, 50, whose family fled north from the Florida Keys town of Marathon last Friday and rode out the storm at an Orlando hotel, only to learn their home was destroyed, along with the gasoline station where he worked. “We came here, leaving everything at home, and we go back to nothing,” Lopez said. His and three other families from Marathon planned to venture back on Wednesday to salvage what they can. Initial damage assessments found 25 percent of homes in the Keys were destroyed and 65 percent with major damage, according to Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Brock Long. “Basically every house in the Keys was impacted,” he told reporters. The islands were largely evacuated by the time Irma barreled ashore on Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of up to 130 mph (215 km/hour). The Palatines will provide replacement housing to those storm victims who are in dire need and without insurance. Please make a generous donation today.   
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