Hurricane Fiona is bearing down on the Dominican Republic after knocking out the power grid and unleashing floods and landslides in Puerto Rico, where the governor said the damage was “catastrophic.” Up to 30 inches was forecast for parts of the island.
“I was sleeping and saw when the corrugated metal flew off,” he said as he observed how the rain drenched his belonging.
Fiona was centered 50 miles southeast of Punta Cana, Dominican Republic with maximum sustained winds of 85 mph on Sunday night, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center. It was moving to the northwest at 9 mph .It hit on the anniversary of Hurricane Hugo, which slammed into the island in 1989 as a Category 3 storm.“That’s probably the worst damage there is,” said Tomás Rivera, who co-owns a hotel in the southwest coastal town of El Combate.
Luma, the company that operates power transmission and distribution, said bad weather, including winds of 80 mph, had disrupted transmission lines on Sunday, leading to “a blackout on all the island.”Health centers were running on generators — and some of those had failed. Health Secretary Carlos Mellado said crews rushed to repair generators at the Comprehensive Cancer Center, where several patients had to be evacuated.
The storm pummeled cities and towns along Puerto Rico’s southern coast that have not yet fully recovered from a string of strong earthquakes starting in late 2019.More than 1,000 people with some 80 pets had sought shelter across the island by Sunday night, the majority of them in the southern coast.
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