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Hurricane Maria slams into Puerto Rico
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Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico yesterday, cutting power on most of the US territory as terrified residents hunkered down in the face of the island’s worst storm in living memory.
After leaving a deadly trail of destruction on a string of smaller Caribbean islands, Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico’s southeast coast around daybreak, packing winds of around 240 kilometers per hour.
“The wind sounds like a woman screaming at the top of her lungs!” photographer and storm chaser Mike Theiss wrote on Twitter, sheltering in a safe room in the eye of the storm.
“We are getting absolutely hammered right now,” he added, posting pictures of walls collapsing in a local restaurant.
Many of the most vulnerable of Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million residents took cover in the 500 shelters set up around the island, with officials warning of life-threatening floods.
“As we anticipated, this is the most devastating storm in a century or in modern history,” said Puerto Rico governor Ricardo Rossello.
“We have many fronts of danger, not only flooding regions, which we have plenty here in Puerto Rico, coastal lines where the surge is coming,” Rossello told CNN.
“Also we have mudslide potential and vulnerable housing — we are talking wooden housing and so forth.”
Although engineers had managed to restore power to most of the island after the recent Hurricane Irma, Rossello said around 60 percent of Puerto Rico had again been blacked out.
Brock Long, who heads the US federal government’s emergency agency FEMA, warned it could take some days for power to be restored on Puerto Rico and the smaller US Virgin Islands which have also been badly hit by Maria.
“Because of the nature of the geography of the islands, it’s a logistical challenge so it will be a frustrating event to get the power back on,” said Long.
“We are well positioned. We have more assets on the islands than before Irma hit. We have 3,200 staff members in the islands collectively. We have multiple days’ worth of commodities, meals, water, and other things ready to go.”
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