Powerful Hurricane Matthew Forces Evacuations in Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba
Matthew’s slow-moving center is expected to near southwestern Haiti and Jamaica on Monday as a major storm bringing 145 mile-per-hour (230 km-per-hour) winds and life-threatening rain, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
Eastern Cuba also will feel bands of fierce wind and rain on Monday, the agency said.
“We are very worried by the situation,” Haitian Interior Minister Francois Anick Joseph said at an operations center in Port-au-Prince. “We want everybody to know that it is real.”
He said 1,300 shelters had been set up, with the capacity to hold 340,000 people.
One person was swept away by high waves on Saturday despite government warnings to stay out of the sea, Anick Joseph said.
The prime minister’s office issued a red alert warning for landslides, high waves and floods. Up to 40 inches (101 cm) of rain could fall on parts of southern Haiti.
In Kingston, Jamaica, major roads and waterways flooded as the first bands from Matthew lashed the island. Cars stalled as rain-drenched drivers tried to push vehicles through streets that flooded within minutes after the downpour started.
Matthew was about 270 miles (435 km) southeast of Kingston on Sunday afternoon and moving northwest at 5 mph (7 kph), with a turn to the north expected overnight. The hurricane center ranked it at Category 4 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
“Slow motion is almost always a bad thing for any land area impacted,” said John Cangialosi, a hurricane specialist at the center. Matthew is expected to remain a powerful hurricane into Tuesday, the center said.
Matthew is the most powerful hurricane to form over the Atlantic since Felix in 2007.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, and a combination of weak government and precarious living conditions for most of its people makes it particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. More than 200,000 people were killed when a 7-magnitude earthquake struck the country in 2010.
Despite worries about potential storm devastation, life in the southern Haitian town of Les Cayes went on much as normal. At the tourist port, one of two restaurants was open, but employee Jonel Glezil said there had been no visitors on Sunday.
Glezil, 28, said he was unprepared for the storm and worried about damage to the restaurant and the town of 70,000 residents, where streets are lined by tall, colorful houses and coconut and mango trees.
“When the hurricane comes, there is no food in my house,” he said as heavy waves driven by high winds broke over the shore. “We can’t live.”
In Jamaica, which could get up to 25 inches (64 cm) of rain, Prime Minister Andrew Holness told Reuters outside his office that his government was mobilized and about 80 percent of the 2.7 million Jamaicans were ready for the storm.
“The damage will have an impact on our economic growth, which is already fragile,” he said, as the wind began to build. In particular, agriculture, tourism and towns cut off by storm damage and landslides will suffer, Holness said.
Kingston residents stocked up on canned food, water and batteries, while banks and offices boarded their windows. Fishermen were told not to go to sea.
In Cuba, where evacuations were under way, many flights were suspended as of noon on Sunday. In Santiago de Cuba, residents formed long lines for supplies while hotels boarded up their windows.
Cuban President Raul Castro warned that Matthew was stronger than Hurricane Sandy, which devastated Santiago de Cuba in 2012.
“We have to prepare as if it has twice the power of Sandy,” the Granma newspaper quoted Castro as saying on a visit to Santiago de Cuba.
A few miles (kilometers) east, the United States was airlifting some 700 spouses and children to Florida from its Guantanamo Bay naval base. Prisoners and service personnel will remain.
Later in the week, Matthew could affect the Bahamas and the U.S. East Coast, although forecasts so far out are often inaccurate. The U.S. State Department issued travel warnings for the Bahamas, Jamaica and Haiti and authorized government workers’ relatives and non-essential personnel to leave.
(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton, Marc Frank and Rebekah Kebede and Joseph Guyler Delva in Port-au-Prince; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel and Letitia Stein; Editing by Bill Trott and Lisa Von Ahn)