CNN
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Hurricane Fiona continued its devastating path on Tuesday, ravaging flooding in Puerto Rico before sweeping through the Dominican Republic, leaving more than a million people without running water and destroying dozens of homes.
Nearly 800 emergency workers in the Dominican Republic were brought to safety, according to Juan Manuel Mendez, Dominican Republic’s director of emergency management operations. At least 519 people took refuge in 29 shelters in the country on Monday, he said.
The National Hurricane Center said the eye of the hurricane hit the nation early Monday, hitting communities with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph. That came after the storm wreaked havoc on Puerto Rico on Sunday and Monday, plunging the U.S. territory into power outages and bringing damage to the island not seen since Hurricane Maria in 2017, officials said.
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Alejandro Granadillo/The Associated Press
Streets in Salinas Beach flooded after Hurricane Fiona passed through Salinas, Puerto Rico, Monday, Sept. 19.
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Ricardo Aduungo/Reuters
Children play on a flooded street after the Fiona disaster in Salinas on Monday.
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– / AFP / Getty Images
A man looks at a flooded street in the Juana Matos neighborhood of Catano, Puerto Rico.
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Ricardo Aduungo/Reuters
A member of the Puerto Rico National Guard searches for rescue workers in Salinas.
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Ricardo Aduungo/Reuters
Members of the Puerto Rico National Guard rescue a woman trapped in her Salinas home.
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Jose Rodriguez/AFP/Getty Images
A woman stands outside a flooded house in Salinas.
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Ricardo Aduungo/Reuters
A man walks past a Puerto Rican flag painted on a door after Hurricane Fiona in Penuelas.
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Stephanie Rojas/The Associated Press
Residents affected by Hurricane Fiona rest at a storm shelter in Salinas.
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Alejandro Granadillo/The Associated Press
A woman clears debris from her flooded property in Salinas.
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Alejandro Granadillo/The Associated Press
Nelson Sirino looked at his bedroom after Hurricane Fiona toppled the roof of his house in Loisa, Puerto Rico, on Sunday.
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Ricardo Aduungo/Reuters
People clear the road from a fallen tree in Yaucco, Puerto Rico, on Sunday.
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Alejandro Granadillo/The Associated Press
Nelson Sirino was protecting the windows of his home when Hurricane Fiona blew in Loisa.
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NOAA/AP
This satellite image provided by NOAA shows Sunday’s Hurricane Fiona in the Caribbean.
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Ricardo Rojas/Reuters
Workers from the Social State program prepare rations for Fiona in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on Sunday.
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Alejandro Granadillo/The Associated Press
Jetsabel Osorio stood at her house in Loisa, which was damaged by Hurricane Maria five years ago, on Saturday.
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Alejandro Granadillo/The Associated Press
Residents taped protective plywood to the windows of their homes in preparation for Fiona’s arrival in Loisa on Saturday.
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Ricardo Aduungo/Reuters
The boat was anchored in the mangroves on Saturday as Fiona approached Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico.
According to officials, at least three people died from the bad weather, one in Guadeloupe, French territory, and two in Puerto Rico.
In Puerto Rico, a 58-year-old man was swept away by a swollen river behind his home in Comerío, and another man in his 30s caught fire while trying to add gasoline to a generator to turn. up, officials said.
At least 1,018,564 customers in the Dominican Republic were without tap water as of Monday afternoon, as 59 aqueducts were out of service and several others were only partially operating, according to state emergency management officer Jose Luis German Mejia.
Some people also lost power on Monday as 10 circuits went offline, emergency management officials said. It is unclear how many people were affected by the outage.
Heavy rains continued to inundate eastern parts of the Dominican Republic on Monday night, with life-threatening flooding expected to continue into Tuesday.
Fiona intensified into a Category 3 storm as it moved off the northern coast of the Dominican Republic early Tuesday, with sustained winds of up to 115 mph and gusts of up to 130 mph, according to the Hurricane Center.
The designation now classifies Fiona as a major hurricane, the first of the Atlantic season.
But the storm’s most powerful phase may not be here yet, as Fiona is expected to be upgraded to Category 4 as it passes near or west of Bermuda on Thursday night.
According to the forecast, the center of the storm is likely to continue to push northward, moving near or east of the Turks and Caicos Islands on Tuesday.
Hurricane conditions are possible in the Turks and Caicos Islands on Tuesday, with tropical storm conditions expected in the Bahamas by late Monday or early Tuesday, the Hurricane Center said.
Even as a tropical storm warning was lifted over Puerto Rico, the island continued to be hit by the outer belt of the hurricane, inundating an area already struggling with dangerous flooding and damage.
Tuesday marked the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic landfall, and some who lived through the 2017 crisis said Fiona’s flood damage could have been worse.
Juan Miguel Gonzalez, a Puerto Rico business owner, told CNN his community hadn’t recovered from Maria when Fiona struck. But this time, he said, the floods brought deeper damage to their homes.
“A lot of people — not just (in) Maria — have lost their houses now … because of the floods they lost everything in their houses,” Gonzalez told CNN’s Leyla Santiago. “Maria was a strong wind. But this time, it was pouring rain and ruined everything in the house.”
Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Pierluis told CNN Monday night that much of the damage on the island was rain-related.
More than 1.2 million customers were still in the dark as of early Tuesday, according to estimates from PowerOutage.us, which noted limited updates on recovery efforts.
Pierluisi said he hopes to restore power to most customers “within a few days.” LUMA Energy, the company that oversees the region’s power grid, previously said interruptions to transmission lines were the cause of the outage, and on Monday said it had restored power to more than 100,000 customers.
Power was restored to one of Puerto Rico’s most critical medical facilities on Monday, according to the region’s health secretary, Dr. Carlos Merado Lopez.
“Power systems have been restored to all hospitals in the medical center complex,” Merado said in a statement. Sunday night tweet“Our patients are safe and getting the medical care they need.”
Many people without electricity also have no access to water, the governor said, as the impact of rain and flooding on filtration systems left only about 35 percent of customers with water service as of Monday.
As of midday Monday, emergency crews battled the incessant rain and rescued about 1,000 people. General Puerto Rico National Guard Lieutenant General Jose Reyes.
In addition to hundreds of Puerto Rican National Guard members helping with rescue and recovery efforts, the White House said Monday that President Joe Biden told Pierre Louis on the phone that federal support would increase in the coming days.
“If a damage assessment is conducted, the president has indicated that the number of support personnel will increase substantially,” the White House said.
New York Governor Kathy Hocher also announced that the state will send 100 state troopers to assist Puerto Rico’s disaster relief efforts. She also said the NYPA team could help restore power.