A COUPLE who opened the doors to their American home as hurricane Irma hit the country have spoken out about their experience of the storm.

Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow, formerly of Danbury, now live in Tampa on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The duo, who were one of the first gay couples in the UK to receive a civil partnership and the first couple to have children through surrogacy, opened their home up to neighbours and tourists ahead of the storm hitting on Sunday and Monday.

More than 3.4 million homes were left without power and parts of Miami were left underwater.

The hurricane was downgraded from category three to one but still had winds of up to 85mph.

Barrie and Tony posted across their social media channels extending their offer of help with the post viewed more than 70,000 and shared more than 600 times.

Speaking in a video posted online after the storm, Barrie said: “Our house is still standing. The sea is definitely different. You can see it is really choppy, it is normally really still. It is really, really windy.

“The good news is we didn’t flood like we were meant to flood.

“We were supposed to be getting at least five to 15 foot surge of water – that still hasn’t happened yet.

“The bay emptied yesterday – it completely went out and people were actually walking on the sea bed.

“When it retracted we all thought we were going to get some sort of mini tsunami and it was all going to come rushing back in and flood us all but it just never happened.

“In fact we are still a foot down on what we normally have in the bay.

“We had a few people stop by after we put our social media message out. We were able to give them water and food. We had a couple of people stay over.

“Everybody is safe which is the main thing.”