Heavy rainfall and catastrophic flooding battered much of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Fiona made landfall Sunday afternoon, creating an island-wide blackout, with over 1.3 million customers still in the dark as of Monday morning.
Fiona made landfall at 3:20 p.m. Sunday with hurricane-force winds, destroying at least one bridge, creating sinkholes and inundating the island with rain.
The devastation and failure of the power grid echoes the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which made landfall five years ago this month and was the deadliest natural disaster on U.S. territory in 100 years.
On Monday the National Weather Service in San Juan urged locals to “move to high ground immediately!” due to ongoing flash flooding, expected to worsen with the pounding rain.
Bands of showers and gusty winds from 30 to 40 mph are forecast to bear down on the island on Monday, especially in the south, from Guayama to Ponce, the weather service said.
Preliminary 64-hour totals show parts of the island have recorded more than 20 inches of rain in the deluge.
Over 1.3 million utility customers remained without power Sunday, according to PowerOutage.us.
As of Monday morning, at least 82,800 customers on the island have had their electricity restored, a spokesperson for Luma Energy, the company in charge of power transmission and distribution in Puerto Rico, told Telemundo Puerto Rico.
Luma said Sunday that it might need several days to fully restore power after there were multiple outages along transmission lines.
Over 700,000 residents were without water service, according to the government’s PREPS page, as of Monday morning 9 a.m.
Recovery efforts were slowed by drenching rain that flooded Mercedita International Airport in Ponce with muddy water, creating mudslides in some neighborhoods and forcing some people to cling to poles in waist-deep water.
As of Monday morning Fiona was making landfall in the Dominican Republic, last located 35 miles southeast of Samana with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.
The storm is forecast to bring hurricane conditions to the Dominican Republic on Monday with a hurricane warning in effect from Cabo Caucedo to Cabo Frances Viejo, as well as Turks and Caicos. A tropical storm warning was in effect for Puerto Rico, including Vieques and Culebra, and the north coast of the Dominican Republic and southeastern Bahamas.
Fiona is expected to continue northwest through Monday night and will turn north-northwest on Tuesday and to the north on Wednesday, the hurricane center said.
The storm is forecast to move over the eastern portion of the Dominican Republic early Monday, with its center passing near or to the east of Turks and Caicos on Tuesday.
Nicole Acevedo contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
