Who Killed the Florida Orange? Highlight

The storms were also part of old Florida culture. But rarely did they make landfall near the oranges. Many of the groves had gone decades without any real hurricane exposure. Then the climate got warmer, and along came Hurricane Irma in 2017, which hammered the Ridge. Its winds, which reached 142 mph, shook the trees violently on their shallow roots. It was the first of many. The trees made it through that year, without evincing the scale of the damage. The next year, or the year after, or three past, when the fruit wasn’t coming, it became clear that the stress of the high winds on already weakened root systems had traumatized the trees, often permanently.