According to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), “the eye of Hurricane Fiona landed along the coast of the Dominican Republic near Boca de Yuma” around 07:30 GMT, with winds of 144 kilometers per hour.
The NHC clarified on Twitter to predict sustained winds that can blow up to 150 km / h. “Floods that could endanger lives are likely to occur in areas located in the east of the Dominican Republic”, according to a point of the NHC at 05:00 local time (09:00 GMT).
Prior to Fiona’s arrival in the Dominican Republic, President Luis Abinader announced that public and private services would be closed on Monday. The island has placed 13 of its 32 provinces, in the North and East, on red alert.
Heavy rains began Sunday evening to fall in Nagua (North), a coastal town of around 80,000 inhabitants located in one of the regions declared on red alert.
On Sunday, Fiona upgraded from a tropical storm to a Category 1 hurricane, at the bottom of the Saffir-Simpson scale, and made landfall at 3:20 p.m. local time (7:20 p.m. GMT) on the southwest coast of Porto. Rico near Punta Tocon, carrying winds of up to 140 km/h. US President Joe Biden has declared a state of emergency for Puerto Rico.
Fiona has notably caused landslides, downed trees and power lines, made roads impassable and led to the collapse of a bridge in the town of Utuado, in the mountainous region in the center of the island, Governor Pedro Pierluisi said at a press conference on Sunday evening.
– No electricity or drinking water –
The entire territory of Puerto Rico, which has more than three million inhabitants, was without electricity as the hurricane approached, he added. At the same time, some 196,000 people were deprived of drinking water.
In the town of Utuado, a family saw the zinc roof of their house fly off, like in 2017 during Hurricane Maria, according to local media.
On Monday, Puerto Rico’s electricity company said on its website that it had “relaunched certain circuits”, without giving figures on the number of people supplied again.
In Puerto Rico, the NHC warned that devastating rains and flash floods would continue to hit the island.
Fiona will remain a “catastrophic event due to the consequences of flooding” in the central mountainous region of eastern and southern Puerto Rico, Pierluisi tweeted, adding that 23 to 33 cm of rain had fallen in just five hours. .
A former Spanish colony, Puerto Rico, which became an American territory at the end of the 19th century before acquiring a special status of “Associated Free State” in the 1950s, has been experiencing serious infrastructure problems for several years.
The island was devastated in 2017 by hurricanes Irma and Maria which seriously damaged its power grid. This was then privatized in June 2021 with the stated aim of solving the problem of power cuts. The island, however, experienced a blackout in April 2022.
The depression is expected to strengthen before heading north towards the Atlantic Ocean, according to the NHC. Tropical storm conditions are expected in the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Southeast Bahamas by late Monday or Tuesday morning.
Fiona had already caused serious damage during her visit to Guadeloupe overnight from Friday to Saturday. In places, the water had risen more than 1.50 meters. A man had died there, carried away with his house by the waves of a flooded river.
With the warming of the surface of the oceans, the frequency of the most intense hurricanes, with more violent winds and more important precipitations, increases. In particular, they pose an increasing risk to coastal communities.
