By CHRIS CIRILLO, NATALIA V. OSIPOVA, SARAH STEIN KERR and BARBARA MARCOLINI 1:47
Hurricane Maria Makes Landfall in Puerto Rico
Video Hurricane Maria reached Puerto Rico as a powerful Category 4 storm early Wednesday. Hours before, it had crossed the United States Virgin Islands as a Category 5 storm, and tore roofs off houses on the Caribbean island of Dominica.
CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
SEPTEMBER 20, 2017
SAN JUAN, P.R. — Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico with a one-two punch of high winds and driving rain on Wednesday, and sent thousands of people scrambling to shelters.
Electricity was knocked out on the whole island, a spokeswoman for the Puerto Rico State Agency for Emergency and Disaster Management said. The authorities warned weary residents not to let down their guard, because flash flooding and mudslides could be more deadly than the initial winds from the storm, now a Category 2system.
The governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló, announced a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew effective Wednesday until Saturday.
“We find ourselves in a critical phase to help the thousands of Puerto Ricans who urgently need help and to determine the serious damages caused by Hurricane Maria,” Governor Rosselló said in a statement.
The storm brought new challenges to an island that has been groaning under the weight of a debt crisis that has crippled the public health and infrastructure systems and sent professionals fleeing to the mainland.
About 600 people took refuge in one of the biggest shelters, the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan, the capital.. Witnesses said the stadium’s roof had come off and the shelter lacked electricity and hot water.
“It’s looking ugly, ugly, ugly over here,” Shania Vargas, a resident of Carolina who sheltered in the stadium, said over the phone. But the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, said in a video shared on Twitter, “As uncomfortable as we are, we are better off than any other place.”
Interactive Feature | Maps: Hurricane Maria’s Path Across Puerto Rico Real-time map showing the position and forecast for Hurricane Maria, and the storm’s impact in Puerto Rico.
Here’s the latest:
• The storm made landfall at Yabucoa in Puerto Rico’s southeast shortly after 6 a.m., as a Category 4 storm with winds as strong as 155 miles per hour. It had crossed the United States Virgin Islands as a Category 5 storm, then weakened slightly but remained “extremely dangerous.”
• More than 500 shelters had been opened, according to the governor, though he said he could not vouch for the storm-worthiness of all of the structures. He said that 11,000 people were reported to have gone to shelters, but that the real number was most likely higher.
• Hartley Henry, an adviser to Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit of Dominica, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that there had been seven confirmed deaths from Hurricane Maria on that island. Two people were also killed on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, officials said.
• Sign up for the Morning Briefing for hurricane news and a daily look at what you need to know to begin your day. Follow the storm’s path with our maps.
A shelter in San Juan early Wednesday. More than 11,000 people have taken refuge in the island’s 500 shelters.
HECTOR RETAMAL / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Flooding is a major concern in Puerto Rico.
“This is just the beginning,” Mr. Rosselló said in an interview with El Nuevo Dia, the largest daily newspaper in Puerto Rico. “We know there are severe damages along different rivers and reservoirs, and water has overflowed from riverbanks, causing flooding,” he added.
The island had not seen a Category 4 storm since 1932. As of 5 p.m., Maria’s core was off the northwestern coast of Puerto Rico with winds of up to 110 m.p.h., the National Hurricane Center said.
Carlos Anselmi, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Puerto Rico, said there had been “record-breaking” amounts of rain, with as much as 35 inches expected in some places. “There have been reports — multiple reports — of coastal flooding along the south, north and east of Puerto Rico,” he said. “We expect this to continue throughout Puerto Rico.”
“Don’t leave your house, that’s the message,” he added. “Nobody in Puerto Rico should be on the street.”
As the storm continued on its northwestward path, tropical storm conditions were expected to begin on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic Wednesday afternoon, worsening into hurricane conditions. The storm would move on to the Turks and Caicos Islands and to the southeastern Bahamas Thursday morning, forecasters said.
Damaged trees and winds during Hurricane Maria in Guaynabo, P.R., on Wednesday.
ERIKA P. RODRIGUEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Puerto Ricans woke up to strong winds.
Residents of Puerto Rico braced for a more direct hit from Maria than it had from Irma, which killed three people there and knocked out power to many.
As the storm moved in, Jerika Llano, 27, took refuge with three family members in her concrete home in Bayamón, a town near the island’s capital. She said the wind was “blowing hard and screaming.”
“Almost all the trees have fallen, and I can see aluminum roofs flying,” she said. “The doors and gates vibrate because of the power of the gusts.”
In the town of Cataño in northern Puerto Rico, several houses lost their zinc roofs and the roof of a church was ripped apart, Felix Delgado Montalvo, the town’s mayor, said on a local radio station.
“My message now is not to leave your houses until the situation is over,” he told listeners.
A shelter in San Juan on Tuesday. Puerto Rico was grazed by Hurricane Irma but braced this time for a direct hit.
HECTOR RETAMAL / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Federal officials say they are prepared to help.
President Trump said on Wednesday that he had “never seen” winds like the ones generated by Hurricane Maria as it made landfall in Puerto Rico.
“We have a big one going right now — I’ve never seen winds like this — in Puerto Rico,” he said as he entered a meeting in New York with King Abdullah II of Jordan. “You take a look at what’s happening there, and it’s just one after another.”
The king extended his “condolences” to residents in the path of the three storms that have hit the United States over the last several weeks, adding, “For us sitting on the outside, looking at how the Americans came together at a difficult time, is really an example to everybody else.”
On CNN, Brock Long, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that the agency was well positioned to help on Puerto Rico and on the United States Virgin Islands.
Mr. Long confirmed that both areas had fragile power systems. “It’s going to be a very frustrating event to get the power back on,” he said.
‘There was howling in every part of this house,’ said a St. Croix resident.
Residents of the Virgin Islands, whose homes were damaged by Irmatwo weeks ago, had been urged to find new shelters to ride out Maria.
The storm began pounding the Virgin Islands on Tuesday evening, and a flash-flood alert was sent to residents’ cellphones at 10:05 p.m., Gov. Kenneth E. Mapp of the United States Virgin Islands said. He had warned that hurricane-strength winds were likely to batter the islands until Wednesday morning.
The core of the storm passed south of the Virgin Islands, with the outer eyewall lashing St. Croix.
“There was howling in every part of this house,” said Ernice Gilbert, a journalist who lives on the east side of the island. “In my area, the winds were ferocious. But the bulk of the winds were expected to hit strongest in the southwest.”
At one point, he said, the rafters of his house began “cracking,” and part of his wall had cracked. The strong winds forced him to barricade his doors with couches, Mr. Gilbert said.
“That was the scariest portion of the ordeal for me,” he said by telephone.
Communications were largely out across the United States Virgin Islands on Wednesday, and its government was assessing the damage, said Garry Green, the emergency operations supervisor at the Virgin Islands Territorial Emergency Management Agency.
Maria had battered the island nation of Dominica a day earlier. Prime Minister Skerrit described the damage as “mind-boggling” and wrote on Facebook that he had to be rescued after winds ripped the roof off his official residence. But little information has emerged since then, with the storm having taken out phone and power lines on the island.
By BARBARA MARCOLINI and DREW JORDAN 1:38Listen: Locals Describe Hurricane Maria’s Damage in Dominica
Video With no power, phones or internet, Dominica residents turned to amateur radio to give updates on their situation after Hurricane Maria battered the island.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní reported from San Juan, Frances Robles from Miami, Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong, and Anemona Hartocollis, Jonah Engel Bromwich and Maya Salam from New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment