Evacuate or face death, officials warn
Puerto Rico’s infrastructure could be flattened by Hurricane Maria: governor
SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO— Hurricane Maria barrelled toward Puerto Rico on Tuesday night after wreaking widespread devastation on Dominica and leaving the small Caribbean island virtually incommunicado.
As rains began to lash Puerto Rico, Gov. Ricardo Rossello warned that Maria could hit “with a force and violence that we haven’t seen for several generations.”
“We’re going to lose a lot of infra- structure in Puerto Rico,” Rossello said, adding that a likely island-wide power outage and communication blackout could last for days. “We’re going to have to rebuild.”
Authorities warned that people in wooden or flimsy homes should find safe shelter before the storm’s expected arrival Wednesday.
“You have to evacuate. Otherwise, you’re going to die,” said Hector Pesquera, the island’s public safety commissioner. “I don’t know how to make this any clearer.”
The warnings came after Dominica Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit sent out a series of dramatic posts on his Facebook page as the storm blew over that tiny country late Monday — but then stopped suddenly as phone and internet connections with the country were cut. “The winds are merciless! We shall survive by the grace of God,” Skerrit wrote before communications went down.
A few minutes later, he messaged he could hear the sound of galvanized steel roofing tearing off houses on the small rugged island. He said that even his own roof had blown away. In the last message before falling silent, he appealed for international aid: “We will need help, my friends, we will need help of all kinds.”
The storm knocked out communications for the entire country, leaving anyone outside Dominica struggling to determine the extent of damage, though it was clearly wide- spread. “The situation is really grave,” Consul General Barbara Dailey said in a telephone interview from New York. She said she lost contact with the island about 4 a.m. At that point, officials had learned that 70 per cent of homes had lost their roofs, including her own.
“I lost everything,” she said, adding there had been no word on casualties. “As a Category 5 it would be naive not to expect any (injuries) but I don’t know how many,” she said.
The island’s broadcast service was also down Tuesday and Akamai Technologies, a company that tracks the status of the internet around the world, said most of Dominica’s internet service appeared to have been lost by midday.