HURRICANE Sandy rolled out of the Bahamas after causing 40 deaths across the Caribbean, churning toward the US East Coast, where it threatens to join forces with winter weather fronts to create a devastating super storm.
The Category 1 hurricane toppled light posts, flooded roads and tore off tree branches as it spun through Cat Island and Eleuthera in the scattered Bahamas archipelago, with authorities reporting one man killed, the British CEO of an investment bank.
The death toll was still rising in impoverished Haiti, reaching 26 today as word of disasters reached officials and rain continued to fall.
When Hurricane Sandy becomes a hybrid weather monster, called "Frankenstorm," it will smack the East Coast harder and wider than last year's damaging Irene - the fifth costliest hurricane in US history at $15.8 billion - forecasters said today.
The brunt of the weather mayhem will be concentrated where the hurricane comes ashore early Tuesday (US time), but there will be hundreds of kilometres of steady, strong and damaging winds and rain for the entire Eastern region for several days, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Huntington Post reported.
When Sandy comes ashore it will get 25.5cm of rain and extreme storm surges, Louis Uccellini, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's environmental prediction director, said today.
Other areas not directly on Sandy's entry path will still get 10 to 20cm of rain, maybe more, he said. Up to half a metre of snow should fall on West Virginia, with lighter snow in parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, regardless of where Sandy first hits.
That storm surge will only be magnified by the full moon this weekend to make it a "dangerous period," Uccellini said.
Hurricane Sandy pounded the Bahamas as it moved towards eastern US after claiming 21 lives in the Caribbean.
A wide swath of the East, measuring several hundreds of kilometres, will get persistent gale-force winds in the 80kmh area, with some areas closer to storm landfall getting closer to 112kmh, said James Franklin, forecast chief for the National Hurricane Centre.
"It's going to be a long-lasting event, two to three days of impact for a lot of people," Franklin said. "Wind damage, widespread power outages, heavy rainfall, inland flooding and somebody is going to get a significant surge event."
Joseph Edgard Celestin, a spokesman for Haiti's civil protection office, said some people died trying to cross rivers swollen by rains from Sandy's outer reaches. While the storm's center missed the country as it passed by Wednesday, Haiti's ramshackle housing and denuded hillsides make it especially vulnerable to flooding.
Officials at a morgue in the western town of Grand Goave said a mudslide crashed through a wooden home on Thursday, killing 40-year-old Jacqueline Tatille and her four children, ranging in ages from 5 to 17.
"If the rain continues, for sure we'll have more people die,'' said morgue deputy Joseph Franck Laporte. ``The earth cannot hold the rain.''
Officials reported flooding across Haiti, where 370,000 people are still living in flimsy shelters as a result of the devastating 2010 earthquake. Nearly 17,800 people had to move to 131 temporary shelters, the Civil Protection Office said.
Sandy was a Category 2 hurricane when it wreaked havoc in Cuba yesterday, killing 11 people in eastern Santiago and Guantanamo provinces as its howling winds and rain destroyed thousands of houses and ripped off roofs. Authorities said it was Cuba's deadliest storm since July 2005, when category 5 Hurricane Dennis killed 16 people and caused $2.4 billion in damage.
Cubans tries to recover belongings from a their destroyed house in Antillas population, Holguin province, 750km east of Havana, by Hurricane Sandy. AFP PHOTO/STR
Cuban authorities said the island's 11 dead included a 4-month-old boy who was crushed when his home collapsed and an 84-year-old man in Santiago province. Near the city of Guantanamo, two men were killed by falling trees, the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported.
Official news media reported today that the storm caused 5,000 houses to at least partially collapse while ripping the roofs off 30,000 others. Banana, coffee, bean and sugar crops were damaged.
Sandy also killed a man in Jamaica on Wednesday when a boulder crashed through his house, and police in the Bahamas said a 66-year-old man died after falling from his roof in upscale Lyford Cay yesterday while trying to repair a window shutter. Officials at Deltec Bank & Trust identified him as Timothy Fraser-Smith, who became CEO in 2000.
One death was reported in Puerto Rico. Police said a man in his 50s was swept away Friday by a swollen river in the southern town of Juana Diaz, where rain from Sandy's outer bands has been steadily falling.
Friday evening, Sandy was about 75 miles (120 kilometers) north of Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas and 400 miles (645 kilometers) south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina. It was barely still a hurricane, with maximum sustained winds near 75 mph (120 kph) and was moving north at 7 mph (11 kph).
With the storm projected to hit the U.S. Atlantic Coast early Tuesday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned it could merge with two other systems to become a hybrid, monster storm.
Government officials in the Bahamas said the storm seemed to have inflicted the greatest damage on Cat Island, which took a direct hit, and Exuma, where there were reports of downed trees, power lines and damage to homes.
"I hope that's it for the year,'' said Veronica Marshall, a 73-year-old hotel owner in Great Exuma. ``I thought we would be going into the night, but around 3 o'clock it all died down. I was very happy about that.''
On Long Island, farmers lost most of their crops and several roofs were torn off, legislator Loretta Butler-Turner said. The island was without power and many residents did not have access to fresh water, she said.
Power also was out on Acklins Island and most roads there were flooded, while the lone school on Ragged Island in the southern Bahamas was flooded.
Russell, the emergency management official in Nassau, said docks on the western side of Great Inagua island had been destroyed and the roof of a government building was partially ripped off.
Jennifer Savoie, a New Orleans native who lives in Eleuthera, said her fiance's resort, The Cove Eleuthera, was spared major damage but that power is out across most of the island.
"We know the protocol and how to prepare,'' she said. "It's in our blood. We were hit pretty hard though.''
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Frankenstorm threat worries US
Dengan url
https://donyblackedet.blogspot.com/2012/10/frankenstorm-threat-worries-us.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Frankenstorm threat worries US
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Frankenstorm threat worries US
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar