Flooding alert in Puerto Rico

As if Hurricane Maria wasn’t enough, more is coming

Puerto Rico braced for potentially calamitous flash flooding on Thursday after being pummeled by Hurricane Maria which just devastated the island and knocked out the entire electricity grid.

The hurricane, which Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello called “the most devastating storm in a century,” had battered the island of 3.4 million people after roaring ashore early Wednesday with deadly winds and heavy rain.

The storm was blamed for 10 deaths in the Caribbean, including a man in Bayamon, in the north part of the island, who died after being struck by a board he had used to cover his windows, government spokeswoman Yennifer Alvarez told AFP.

Although the storm had moved back out to sea, authorities early Thursday declared a flash flood warning for all of Puerto Rico as “torrential” rains continued to lash the island.

“If possible, move to higher ground NOW!” the National Weather Service station in San Juan said in a tweet, calling the flooding “catastrophic.”

Puerto Rico was expected to receive 51 to 76 centimeters of rain through Saturday, with some isolated areas receiving 88 centimeters, the US National Hurricane Center said.

The rain had turned some roads in the US territory into muddy brown rivers.

As of 5:00 am, Maria was a Category Three storm on the five-point Saffir-Simpson scale, with winds of 185 kilometers per hour. It was churning in the Caribbean Sea about 112 kilometers north of Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic.

Maria was expected to pass north of the Dominican Republic on Thursday as it moved toward the Turks and Caicos Islands.

In Puerto Rico, Maria delivered “a lot of flooding, a lot of infrastructure damage, telecommunication system is partially down, energy infrastructure is completely down,” Rossello told CNN.

Authorities did not have much information from the island’s southeast, which was “virtually disconnected” after taking a direct hit from Maria when it made landfall as a Category Four storm with winds of more than 241 kilometers per hour.