Devastation as Maria follows in Irma’s wake
HURRICANE Maria – the second maximum strength storm to hit the Caribbean this month, battered the US Virgin Island of St Croix yesterday and headed towards Puerto Rico – is set to be the strongest storm to hit the island in about 90 years.
Maria, packing catastrophic winds and causing surges, earlier killed at least one person in the French territory of Guadeloupe and devastated the tiny island nation of Dominica.
The storm hit just days after the region was punched by Hurricane Irma, which ranked as one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record and left a trail of destruction on several Caribbean islands and the Florida Keys.
Maria – a rare Category 5 storm at the top end of the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale – was downgraded to a Category 4 storm as it neared Puerto Rico, where it was set to make landfall in the morning. It was packing maximum sustained winds near 250km/ph and was 80km southeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the US National Hurricane Centre (NHC) said.
A few hours earlier, Maria passed west of St Croix, which is home to about half of the US Virgin Island’s 103 000 residents, as a Category 5 storm. Its outer-eye wall lashed the island with sustained winds of about 145km/h, the NHC said.
The centre has hurricane warnings and watches out for the US and the British Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Culebra, and Vieques, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the southeastern Bahamas and the Dominican Republic from Cabo Engano to Puerto Plata.
Many of the US Virgin Islands residents fled to shelters around noon on Tuesday. US Virgin Islands’ governor Kenneth Mapp warned people on the islands that their lives were at risk.
“The only thing that matters is the safety of your family, your children and yourself. The rest of the stuff, forget it,” he said.
Maria was set to cross Puerto Rico late yesterday and pass just north of the northeast coast of the Dominican Republic last night and today, the NHC warned.
It was too early to know if Maria will threaten the continental US as it moves northwards in the Atlantic.
Earlier this month, Irma devastated several small islands, including Barbuda and the US and British Virgin Islands, and caused extensive damage in Cuba and Florida, killing at least 84 people in the Caribbean and on the US mainland.
Maria was set to be the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico since 1928, when the San Felipe Segundo hurricane made a direct hit on the island and killed about 300 people, the National Weather Service said.
In Puerto Rico, Maria is expected to dump as much as 635mm of rain on parts of the island and bring storm surges – when hurricanes push ocean water dangerously over normal levels – of up to 2.70m, the NHC warned.
The heavy rainfall could cause life-threatening flash floods and mudslides, it added.
“We have not experienced an event of this magnitude in modern history,” Ricardo Rossello, governor of Puerto Rico, said.