Caribbean islands devastated by storm surge, winds, rain
By
our reporter
11 September 2017
Hurricane Irma completed its passage through the islands of the Caribbean Sea Saturday, slashing along the northern coast of Cuba as a Category 5 storm, the most powerful to strike the country since 1924, before turning north toward the Florida Keys and the US mainland.
As it has repeatedly in previous storms, the Cuban government was more successful than any other in the region in conducting an orderly mass evacuation, which took one million people away from the endangered coastal regions along the eastern half of the island. No deaths have yet been reported in Cuba, although there was extensive and widespread storm damage throughout the region.
Irma made landfall in Cuba late Friday and then began to weaken and slow down, which only intensified the destructive impact, since the storm lingered over the affected area, moving at only 9 mph. At its height, there were sustained winds of 118 mph and a gust as strong as 159 mph reported at Falla, Cuba.
The northward turn took the hurricane away from the island’s largest population center, the capital city Havana, but there were still evacuations of many waterfront neighborhoods in the city.
Because the most damaging winds from the hurricane are on the northeast and northern edges of the eyewall, Irma dealt its most damaging blows to the British and US Virgin Islands and to the southern Bahamas, as it moved through an ocean corridor with Puerto Rico, Hispaniola (comprised of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba to its south.
With only fragmentary information available, at least five people were reported killed in the British Virgin Islands and another four in the US Virgin Islands. Trees were ripped out the ground by 130-mph winds…