Hurricane Elsa yesterday raced toward Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where it threatened to unleash flooding and landslides before taking aim at Cuba and Florida.
The Category 1 storm was about 635km east-southeast of Isla Beata, Dominican Republic, and was moving west-northwest at 46kph. It had maximum sustained winds of 130kph, with the hurricane expected to become a tropical storm after hitting Cuba, according to the US National Hurricane Center in Miami.
The long-term forecast track showed it heading toward Florida as a tropical storm by Tuesday morning, but some models would carry it into the Gulf of Mexico or up the Atlantic coast of the US.
Photo: AP
In Haiti, authorities used social media to alert people about the hurricane and urged them to evacuate if they lived near water or mountain flanks.
“The whole country is threatened by this hurricane,” the Haitian Civil Protection Agency said in a statement. “Make every effort to escape before it’s too late.”
Haiti is especially vulnerable to floods and landslides because of widespread erosion and deforestation.
A hurricane warning was issued for Jamaica and from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, to Punta Palenque in the Dominican Republic.
A hurricane watch was in effect for the Cuban provinces of Camaguey, Granma, Guantanamo, Holguin, Las Tunas and Santiago de Cuba. Some of those provinces have reported a high number of COVID-19 infections, raising concerns that the storm could force large groups of people to seek shelter together.
In the neighboring Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, authorities opened more than 2,400 shelters as forecasters warned of heavy rains starting yesterday before dawn.
Elsa was forecast to brush past the southernmost point of Hispaniola by early yesterday afternoon and then take aim at communities in southern Haiti.
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