Hurricane Matthew on Friday surged in power to become the Caribbean’s strongest storm in nine years as it moved toward Jamaica and Cuba with winds of up to 260 kph, powerful enough to wreck houses, forecasters said.
Matthew was about 710km southeast of Kingston, and the US National Hurricane Center designated it as a category 5, the strongest on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
The strongest hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean since Hurricane Felix in 2007 was forecast to make landfall as a major storm tomorrow on Jamaica’s palm-fringed southern coast, home to the capital and Jamaica’s only oil refinery. It could affect the island’s main tourist areas, such as Montego Bay in the north.
“The government is on high alert,” said Robert Morgan, director of communications at the Jamaican prime minister’s office. “We hope that the hurricane does not hit us, but if it does hit us, we are trying our very best to ensure that we are in the best possible place.”
Local disaster coordinators, police and military have been put on standby and shelters are being opened throughout the island, Morgan said.
Despite the sunny weather and a few scattered clouds, many Kingston residents were stocking up on water and food on Friday in preparation.
Jamaica was hard hit by Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, and the last major hurricane in the region was Hurricane Sandy, in 2012.
Matthew could be the most powerful storm to cross the island since records began, meteorologist Eric Holthaus said on Twitter.
Tenaj Lewis, 41, a doctor who was stocking up at the MegaMart grocery store in Kingston on Friday afternoon, said Jamaica was much better prepared for hurricanes than it was when Gilbert hit.
“The country literally shut down for months,” she said.
Since then, hurricanes have caused a few days of power outages to the island nation, but have not been nearly as destructive.
Some residents were enjoying the calm before the storm.
Peter Silvera, who owns the Longboarder Bar & Grill in Roselle, a small hamlet on the southeastern coast of the island, said he was surfing all morning.
“This is when we get the best waves,” he said, but added he would be securing his outdoor tables and “battening down the hatches” to ride out the storm.
As a precaution, Southwest Airlines warned that flights to Montego Bay could be disrupted and said customers could reschedule.
Matthew is also forecast to skim past the southern coast of Haiti tomorrow, carrying tropical storm conditions.
Haiti has been hard hit by natural disasters in the past, and officials said preparation efforts were focused in the south of the country.
“We will prepare with drinking water for the patients, with medication, with generators for electricity, available vehicles to go look for people at their homes,” said Yves Domercant, the head of the public hospital in Les Cayes in the south.
In Cuba, which has a strong track record of keeping its citizens out of harm’s way when storms strike, residents of the eastern coastal city of Santiago de Cuba said they were tracking the news closely, although skies were still blue.
The storm killed one person in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines earlier in the week.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was