Joan Galasso walked through the empty wreck of the waterfront seafood restaurant she and her husband started a quarter-century ago and was horrified.
Hurricane Matthew killed almost 900 people and left tens of thousands homeless in Haiti earlier this week before it skirted Florida's Atlantic coast on Friday and plowed northward over waters just off Georgia.
The first major hurricane threatening a direct hit on the United States in more than 10 years lashed Florida on Friday with heavy rains and winds after killing at least 339 people in Haiti on its destructive march north through the Caribbean.
Hurricane Hermine tore a path of destruction across Florida on Friday, leaving more than 253,000 homes and businesses without power, flooding low-lying areas and raising concerns about the spread of the Zika virus due to the massive pools of standing water left behind.
Tests have found the Zika virus in mosquitoes from Miami, the first detected on continental United States, confirming local transmission of the disease, the Florida authorities said.
Hurricane Hermine swept onto Florida's Gulf coast early Friday with winds and heavy rain causing flooding and cutting power to tens of thousands of people, with officials warning of "life threatening" conditions.
The state of Florida has identified 10 more cases of Zika virus caused by local mosquitoes and has asked the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to send in experts to help with its investigation of the outbreak.
At least two people were killed and more than a dozen others were wounded, many of them teenagers, in a shooting in the parking lot of a nightclub in Fort Myers, Florida, early on Monday, authorities said.
Florida's Walt Disney World plans to put up signs warning of the danger of alligators following the death of a toddler snatched from the shore of a resort lake, US media reported.
The investigation into the death of a two-year-old boy likely drowned by an alligator at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida is ongoing but is not a criminal case, a spokeswoman for the local sheriff's office said.
Walt Disney World resort in Florida closed its beaches on Wednesday as law enforcement officials hunted for signs of a 2-year-old boy who was dragged by an alligator into a lagoon at the resort.
US investigators on Tuesday worked to untangle the complicated motive of the "radicalised" gunman behind the massacre at a gay club in Orlando, as reports emerged that he frequented the popular nightspot.
