Nations rush to help islands devastated by Hurricane Irma
Irma closed in with winds of 175 mph (281 kph).
“Take it seriously, because this is the real deal,” said Maj. Jeremy DeHart, a United States Air Force Reserve weather officer who flew through the eye of Irma at 10,000 feet.
The hurricane was still north of the Dominican Republic and Haiti on Thursday evening, sweeping the neighboring nations on Hispaniola island with high winds and rain while battering the Turks and Caicos islands on its other side.
Big waves smashed a dozen homes into rubble in the Dominican fishing community of Nagua, but work crews said all the residents had left before the storm. Officials said 11,200 people in all had evacuated vulnerable areas, while 55,000 soldiers had been deployed to help the cleanup.
In Haiti, two people were injured by a falling tree, a national roadway was blocked by debris and roofs were torn from houses along the north- ern coast but there were no immediate reports of deaths. Officials warned that could change as Irma continued to lash Haiti, where deforested hillsides are prone to devastating mudslides that have wiped out entire neighborhoods of precariously built homes in flood zones.
“We are vulnerable. We don’t have any equipment to help the population,” Josue Alusma, mayor of the northern city of Port de Paix, said on Radio Zenith FM.
About a million people were without power in Puerto Rico after Irma sideswiped the island overnight, and nearly half the territory’s hospitals were relying on generators. No injuries were reported.
The first islands hit by the storm were scenes of terrible destruction.