Caribbean: Powerful waves and storm surge top Havana’s famed Malecon seawall and swamp thousands of homes and businesses.
HAVANA — Powerful waves and storm surge from Hurricane Irma topped Havana’s famed Malecon seawall and left thousands of homes, businesses and hotels swamped Sunday, even as the storm moved away from the island.
There were no immediate reports of fatalities in Cuba, where the government prides itself on disaster preparedness and said it had carried out evacuations totaling more than 1 million people.
Authorities warned that the floodwaters could linger for more than a day, and there was still-unknown damage to sugarcane and banana fields in central Cuba and to northern cays studded with resorts, potentially dealing a major blow to the country’s vital tourism industry.
The powerful storm ripped roofs off homes, collapsed buildings and caused floods along hundreds of miles of coastline after cutting a trail of destruction across the Caribbean. Irma has killed at least 24 people in the region, leaving officials scrambling to bring aid to shattered communities.
In Havana, home to 2 million residents, central neighborhoods along the coast between the Almendares River and Havana harbor suffered the brunt of the flooding, with seawater penetrating as much as one-third of a mile inland in places.
Waves as high as 20 feet continued to pound Havana, and Civil Defense Col. Luis Angel Macareno warned that the flooding would persist into Monday.
Emergency workers and residents boated and waded through streets littered with all manner of debris: toppled trees, downed electrical lines, roofs torn off by the winds, and cement water tanks that fell from atop homes to the ground.
Elena Villar and her mother spent the night huddling in the lobby of a building on higher ground as her home of 30 years filled with more than 6 feet of water. “I have lost everything,” she said, on the edge of tears.
Floodwaters entered the high-end Melia Cohiba and Riviera hotels, where the storm damaged the buildings, landscaping and roofing.
The storm also damaged the seaside U.S. Embassy, tossing around shipping containers that sit on the compound, smashing parts of its black perimeter fence and breaking windows and doors. The embassy’s flag was torn and fluttering from its staff early Sunday.
Similar scenes played out across the Caribbean, where the storm devastated islands before setting its sights on Florida.
In St. Martin, formerly lush green hills were stripped to a brown stubble and the smell of rotting debris spread across the French Caribbean territory of 40,000 people. Irma passed through earlier in the week as a Category 5 storm.
A truck drove through damaged neighborhoods distributing water, and authorities expected to set up distribution points Monday. Plans to do so were initially delayed by Hurricane Jose, which roared toward the region as a Category 4 storm Saturday but turned north without doing much further harm.
“Everything has been destroyed where I work. There’s nothing there,” 27-year-old Manon Brunet-Vita said as she walked through the streets of Grand Case. “When I got to this neighborhood, I cried.”
More than 1,000 tons of water and 85 tons of food have been shipped to the French Caribbean territories of St. Martin and St. Barts, and additional deliveries are expected, according to officials on the nearby island of Guadeloupe.