FORT MYERS, Fla—Millions of people huddled in shelters or in battened-down homes in Florida on Sunday morning as Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Atlantic, prepared to make landfall with 130-mph (210 kph) winds and catastrophically high seas.
The National Hurricane Center forecast potentially deadly storm surges—water driven ashore by the winds—of up to 15 feet (4.6 m). As the northern edge of the storm reached the Florida Keys archipelago off the tip of southern Florida, lashing rains and winds knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people on the mainland.
