Turks and Caicos slammed by Fiona
Hurricane Fiona battered the Turks and Caicos Islands as a Category 3 storm Tuesday, prompting people in some areas to seek shelter and stock up on food, after it knocked out Puerto Rico’s power grid and drenched parts of the Dominican Republic.
The storm was about 75 miles north of North Caicos Island on Tuesday night, churning on a path that, after a shift to the north-northwest, will take it to Bermuda by late Thursday, the National Hurricane Center said. The storm has had sustained maximum winds of 125 mph, the center said.
By early afternoon Tuesday, 163 people in Turks and Caicos were in shelters, officials said, and power outages were reported on the islands of Providenciales, Grand Turk, Salt Cay, South Caicos, North Caicos and Middle Caicos. The hurricane center warned of life-threatening flooding, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or fatalities.
Even as Fiona drenched Turks and Caicos, its effects continued to be felt in the Dominican Republic and in Puerto Rico, where most people remained without electricity and running water Tuesday.
The authorities in Puerto Rico said they had restored power to more than 300,000 utility customers, but nearly 1.2 million customers were still without power Tuesday afternoon, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks interruptions. Two-thirds of the island’s water and sewer customers — more than 760,000 — still did not have service because of a lack of power to pumps or turbid water at filtration plants, officials said.
Fiona strengthened into a Category 3 storm hours before a weather system in the Atlantic developed into Tropical Storm Gaston on Tuesday afternoon, becoming the seventh named storm of 2022. That storm posed no immediate threat to land.
A tropical storm warning was in effect for the southeastern Bahamas while Bermuda was under a tropical storm watch. Forecasters did not anticipate that Fiona would threaten the East Coast of the U.S., but the center said it could generate swells causing life-threatening surf and rip currents there.