Aftermath of Hurricane Irma
While reviewing my photo archives, I came across images I shot almost nine years ago documenting the damage in Coconut Grove and Brickell after Hurricane Irma.
Irma hit Miami on September 10, 2017. By the time the winds died down, downtown streets were underwater, power was out across the city, and the marina in Coconut Grove looked like a boatyard had been picked up and thrown. Sailboats on their sides. A fishing boat listing at an angle no boat should sit at. One vessel tangled up in the roots of a tree that used to be standing next to it.
Brickell wasn't much better. Palm trees down across the avenue, one leaning into a building entrance like it had tried to walk in. A man climbing over a fallen tree just to get down the street, because that was faster than walking around it.
What stuck with me wasn't the destruction so much as how ordinary it looked a few days in. A runner on a debris-strewn street. A parent and kid walking past an uprooted tree like it was just another obstacle on the sidewalk. Cars navigating around branches like it was Tuesday. The city doesn't stop, even when it's half underwater.
More Miami photography in the Miami gallery.
For more on how Miami's neighborhoods keep changing, see A Walk Through Buena Vista Before It Disappears.