Puerto Ricans flee as Maria makes landfall

HURRICANE Maria roared ashore on Puerto Rico yesterday as the strongest storm to strike the island in more than 80 years, while panicked residents fled to high ground and huddled in shelters hoping to withstand powerhouse winds that have already left death and devastation across the Caribbean.

“On the forecast track, Maria would be the most destructive hurricane in Puerto Rico history,” tweeted Eric Blake, a forecaster at the Hurricane Centre.

Michael Brennan, another Hurricane Centre forecaster, tweeted late on Tuesday that he was “starting to run out of adjectives” for Maria, the second huge hurricane to plow through the Caribbean this month. “Horrifying,” Brennan wrote. Already, Maria has roared over islands to the east with winds of more than 250km/h and downpours that triggered flooding and landslides. In the French island of Guadeloupe, officials said at least two deaths were blamed on Maria, and at least two people were missing after a ship went down near the tiny French island of Desirade.

Maria’s force was clear from its first brush with land. In a breathless series of Facebook posts late on Monday, the prime minister of the island nation of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit, described furious winds that tore off the roof of his official residence.

“My roof is gone. I am at the complete mercy of the hurricane. House is flooding,” he wrote.

Puerto Rico was spared the full force of the Category 5 monster Irma earlier this month. Yet the storm came close enough to knock out power for about a million people on Puerto Rico and weaken its hurricane defences.

“This is going to be an extremely violent phenomenon,” Puerto Rican Governor Ricardo Rosselló said as Maria approached. “We have not experienced an event of this magnitude in our modern history.”

Before dawn, Maria was 80km south-east of San Juan and churning to the north-west at 16km/h. Its maximum sustained winds of 250km/h were down slightly from late Tuesday. But that meant little for Maria’s ability to threaten anything in its path.

“Maria is an extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane… and it should maintain this intensity until landfall,” the Hurricane Centre said.

The centre warned that the rain – possibly exceeding 62cm in some places – may “prompt numerous evacuations and rescues” and “enter numerous structures within multiple communities”, adding that streets and parking lots may “become rivers of raging water” and that some structures will become “uninhabitable or washed away”.

To the north, the remnants of Hurricane Jose brought pounding surf and 100km/h winds to southern New England. Tropical storm warnings were issued for the coast from Rhode Island to Cape Cod. – Washington Post

WE HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED AN EVENT OF THIS MAGNITUDE IN OUR MODERN HISTORY