Hurricane Fiona: Hurricane Fiona’s Destruction Mounts in the Caribbean (Published 2022) (2024)

Pinned

Another storm leaves Puerto Rico in the dark on the anniversary of Hurricane Maria.

While Fiona will be the direct culprit, Puerto Ricans will also blame years of power disruptions, the result of an agonizingly slow effort to finally give the island a stable grid. Hurricane Maria, a near-Category 5 storm, hit on Sept. 20, 2017, leaving about 3,000 dead and damaging 80 percent of the system. The last house was not reconnected to the system until nearly a year later. Hurricane Fiona, with far less ferocious winds, is the strongest storm to reach the island since.

Its copious rains on Sunday and Monday — more than 30 inches in some areas in southern Puerto Rico and its central mountainous region — caused the island’s vast lattice of canals and creeks to swell, turned entire streets into muddy rivers and forced the rescues of more than 1,000 people. At least one person died, while operating a generator, while another death was recorded in the Dominican Republic.

“I’ve never seen this in my life, not even in Maria,” said Ada Belmot Plaza, who had to be rescued by the Puerto Rico National Guard as waist-high floodwaters rose outside her daughter’s house in the El Coquí neighborhood of Salinas, on Puerto Rico’s southern coast.

Some Puerto Ricans said Hurricane Fiona took them by surprise, and many in the hardest-hit areas were still waiting for government help on Monday as neighbors came together to clear fallen trees from roads and remove debris from homes. Gov. Pedro R. Pierluisi urged people to stay indoors. He said he expected most electricity to be back up “in a matter of days.” By Monday morning, power had been restored to some 100,000 customers, out of 1.5 million.

The federal government paid $3.2 billion to patch up the island’s electrical grid in Hurricane Maria’s wake. But that was just to get the power back on; Congress earmarked an additional $10 billion to modernize the antiquated and inefficient system.

The Puerto Rico government and the fiscal board appointed by Congress to oversee the island’s finances required that the power transmission and distribution system be privatized after deeming the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which is bankrupt but continues to run power generation, to be ineffective. Funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency will finance any new upgrades.

In 2020, Puerto Rico awarded a 15-year contract to LUMA Energy, a private Canadian-American consortium, for a fixed annual fee of $115 million. After taking over in June of last year, the company quickly struggled with rolling summer blackouts. There was an islandwide outage in April, with no bad weather in sight.

And so, in the wake of Hurricane Fiona, most Puerto Ricans face the daunting prospect of spoiled food and medication, sticky nights and the other familiar risks and indignities of being plunged into darkness. They are somewhat better equipped this time because those who could afford generators bought them after the Hurricane Maria fiasco. But that came with its own dangers: Officials on Monday said a man died while trying to operate a generator. His wife suffered severe burns, but survived.

In the Dominican Republic, the storm killed at least one person, a 68-year-old man who was hit by a falling tree in the northern province of María Trinidad Sánchez, according to local media.

As Hurricane Fiona moved westward, it battered the eastern provinces of the Dominican Republic, home to one of the largest tourism industries in the Caribbean. Heavy rain and 90-mile-per-hour winds set off mudslides that shuttered resorts and damaged highways, officials said.

The storm is expected to pass near the islands of Turks and Caicos on Tuesday before strengthening at sea into a major hurricane — a Category 3 or higher — by Wednesday, the National Hurricane Center said. It is not forecast to approach the East Coast of the United States.

In Puerto Rico, overflowing waterways and the loss of power caused pumps to fail, leaving 70 percent of households and businesses that rely on the public water and sewer system without potable water.

Mr. Pierluisi said he had been coordinating with the White House to receive assistance. President Biden issued an emergency declaration on Sunday, unlocking federal funding and FEMA support. Mr. Biden called Mr. Pierluisi from Air Force One as the president flew back from the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London, according to the White House.

States also lined up to send mutual aid. New York said more than 100 Spanish-speaking members of the State Police would help clear streets, direct traffic and respond to other needs in Puerto Rico.

Most customers who had electricity on Monday, including a couple of hospitals, were in the San Juan metropolitan area, which was spared the worst of Hurricane Fiona’s rains.

The damage from Fiona’s floodwaters is expected to be vast — in the “billions,” Mr. Pierluisi estimated — a sobering reminder that a storm’s categorization under the Saffir-Simpson scale considers its maximum wind speeds, but not its rainfall or storm surge potential.

In the town of Cayey, residents had to clear out the mud after the La Plata River surged and almost completely submerged a two-story house. A temporary bridge erected over the Guaonica River in Utuado buckled, its demise captured on dramatic video as rushing waters and debris washed it away. The bridge was put up after Hurricane Maria to connect devastated neighborhoods in the area, and a new, permanent bridge was scheduled to go up in 2024.

In Santa Isabel, on the southern coast of the island, Itzamary Alvarado said she had more water in her house than during Hurricane Maria. Government officials, she said, should have given the public more warning about Hurricane Fiona, which had initially approached the island as a tropical storm.

“I think the government minimized what was going to happen,” Ms. Alvarado said. “I found out it was a hurricane at 11 a.m. on Sunday, so I left everything and ran to the supermarket. I had not prepared for a hurricane.”

For her and many others, the storm was a test of whether the government response to disasters would be better after Maria.

“We have been struggling for five years and see the same conditions from the government in the management of emergency situations,” Ms. Alvarado said. “It’s frustrating.”

But she suddenly had a sign that things were changing for the better: Trucks from Puerto Rico’s power company, LUMA, appeared on her street.

“A LUMA brigade just drove by my house,” she said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Comparisons to Hurricane Maria were inevitable, from both residents and officials.

The island’s hospitals were running on backup generators, in stark contrast to 2017, when many lost power, damaging medical equipment and leaving hundreds of sick patients dangerously at risk. About 75 percent of cellphone towers were still functioning after the storm passed, compared with the near-total signal wipeout five years ago.

Mr. Pierluisi stressed that officials were still in the rescue-and-response phase of the emergency and had not begun to assess the scale of the damage, or determine the island’s path to recovery. Still, he said, the local government’s response had so far been “exemplary” compared with what happened after Maria.

“Maria served as a lesson, an exercise for our emergency response teams at all levels,” Mr. Pierluisi, a member of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party who took office in 2021, said in a news conference. “In terms of the coordination we’ve seen, there’s a big difference.”

Hurricane Maria, which struck within weeks of Hurricane Irma in 2017, laid bare the tenuous state of the island’s aging, poorly maintained infrastructure. Its powerful winds, with gusts exceeding 100 m.p.h., destroyed thousands of homes and wiped out the island’s agriculture and access to communications. Recovery was painfully sluggish, and the lack of potable water, fuel and food supplies in the wake of the storm prompted an exodus of tens of thousands of residents to the United States mainland.

Public fury bubbled up at the government’s response to the storm. In 2019, a grass-roots movement channeling the anger formed, fueling a popular uprising in 2019 that lasted 15 days and caused former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló to step down.

Puerto Ricans remain skeptical of their leaders’ abilities to respond to disasters. In Salinas on Monday, Ana Medina Cardona, 74, said government reconstruction contractors had repaired a section of her tin roof that was torn apart by Hurricane Maria.

On Sunday, rain started pouring through that repaired roof while she was home with her dog, Famy.

“It seems they didn’t do a great job, because water was coming down the walls,” Ms. Medina Cardona said. “This time around, it was even worse than in Maria.”

She waited in a shelter to hear if the water had receded enough for her to return home. But she was unconvinced it was her best option.

“If we can go back,” she said, “that also means going back there to a house without power.”

Reporting was contributed by Grace Ashford, Holga Enecia Pérez, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Christine Hauser, Charo Henríquez, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Edgar Sandoval and Daniel Victor.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

President Biden promises to increase the number of federal rescue workers in Puerto Rico.

The president approved an emergency declaration for Puerto Rico on Sunday, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster relief. FEMA’s administrator, Deanne Criswell, is scheduled to travel to Puerto Rico on Tuesday to assess the island’s needs.

Local and federal response efforts were criticized after past catastrophic disasters in Puerto Rico, including Hurricane Maria, which brought wide-scale damage in 2017, and a devastating earthquake in early 2020.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, which killed more than 3,000 people, a FEMA report revealed that the agency had been sorely underprepared for the storm and had significantly underestimated the amount of food, water and supplies needed in the relief effort. President Donald J. Trump attempted to downplay the storm’s number of fatalities, and his administration was reluctant to provide disaster relief funds to the island.

The island’s leadership has also been the target of public condemnation. In the summer of 2019, an uprising that was partially in response to the government’s poor response to Hurricane Maria resulted in the resignation of Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló.

Sept. 19, 2022, 5:34 p.m. ET

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Hurricane Fiona kills at least one and forces a state of emergency in the Dominican Republic.

The country is only beginning to evaluate the full extent of the damage from the worst natural disaster in at least five years, Luis Abinader, the country’s president, told reporters at the National Palace on Monday afternoon. His energy minister, Antonio Almonte, added that it may take days to restore water and electricity to the worst-hit communities.

Mr. Abinader said three of the worst-hit provinces would be declared “disaster zones,” including the area around the city of Punta Cana, one of the biggest tourist destinations in the Caribbean. The president did not provide an estimate of the number of affected citizens or economic damage, and he declined to say whether he would send the military to help with the rescue efforts.

Although Fiona left the Dominican Republic on Monday afternoon, heavy rains continued lashing the country’s east, complicating the work of emergency services, Mr. Abinader said.

The Dominican Republic’s top meteorological official said the country’s eastern provinces remained threatened by rising rivers.

“Just because there’s calm doesn’t mean that the event has passed,” said Gloria Ceballo, director of the National Meteorological Office, adding that strong winds and heavy rain were common after the eye of a hurricane passed over.

Separately, the local power company CEPM, which supplies electricity to about 100,000 hotel rooms and residential homes in the Punta Cana area, said in a statement that the hurricane had affected supply to about 60 percent of its customers.

The Dominican Republic’s tourism chamber said the Punta Cana airport expected to reopen flights on Monday night.

Storm-driven flooding in Guadeloupe killed a man over the weekend.

André Atallah, the mayor of Basse-Terre, told local news outlets that two people had been missing, including the man who was found dead; the second person was found to be safe. After landing in Guadeloupe, but hours before making landfall in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic on Sunday, the storm strengthened into the third Atlantic hurricane of the 2022 season.

The archipelago, which includes the island of Guadeloupe and several smaller islands, is a department of France, with a population of around 400,000 people. Mr. Atallah said that while the local government was managing the disaster, the efforts needed to recover from the storm will be enormous.

President Emmanuel Macron of France said that the national government would recognize a state of natural disaster in Guadeloupe. He wrote on Twitter that he had asked a senior member of his government to visit the archipelago and that an aid fund would be activated.

Guadaloupe was hit hard by flooding and high winds in 2017 when Hurricane Maria swept through the Caribbean, leaving many of the countries and territories in its path without electricity and washing out roads and bridges.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Sept. 19, 2022, 4:10 p.m. ET

Flooding in southern Puerto Rico forces hundreds from their homes.

Ms. Belmot Plaza said the water was already waist-high around 8 p.m. Sunday when she and her daughter were rescued by military personnel. They were brought to a public school that had been turned into an emergency shelter and were eventually joined by about 400 other evacuees.

For Ms. Belmot Plaza, Hurricane Fiona’s destructive impact was the second time — the first was after Hurricane Maria five years ago — that she had received a visceral reminder of nature’s awful power.

“Sometimes, we make fun of nature,” Ms. Belmot Plaza said. “We think and we say, ‘No, that’s not coming,’ and don’t get prepared. But if we don’t learn from this experience, we never will.”

She was optimistic about the fate of her home back in Santa Isabel, though she knew it was also flooded. A neighbor had called to tell her.

“I’ve never seen this in my life, not even in Maria,” said Ms. Belmot Plaza, who has lived in Santa Isabel her whole life.

Ana Medina Cardona, 74, was with her dog, Famy, in her home in the El Coquí neighborhood of Salinas when rain started coming in through the tin roof. It was the same section of roof that was torn apart by Hurricane Maria’s winds in 2017 and later was replaced by government reconstruction contractors.

“It seems they didn’t do a great job, because water was coming down the walls,” Ms. Medina Cardona said.

“This time around, it was even worse than in Maria,” said Ms. Medina Cardona, who was waiting to hear if water had receded enough to allow her to return home. But she was not convinced it was her best option.

“If we can go back, that also means going back there to a house without power,” said Ms. Medina Cardona, who moved to her home in El Coquí 20 years ago, after coming back from New York City, where she had lived with her late husband. “After 9/11, I decided I wanted to come back. I want to die in my homeland.”

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Fiona threatens to upend the Dominican Republic’s tourism industry.

Although the full extent of the damage was not immediately clear, videos posted on social media and interviews with tourism workers suggested that gale-force winds, downpours and mudslides had affected at least some of the hotels, restaurants and other tourist destinations that attract millions of visitors to the region around Punta Cana each year.

The Dominican Republic’s hotel association said that about 50,000 tourists were staying in the Punta Cana area when Fiona made landfall, and that visitors were told to shelter in place. The hurricane struck during the country’s low tourism season.

No fatalities were immediately reported, but officials warned that the risk remained high because of rising rivers.

The strength of the hurricane “exceeded our expectations,” said Ernesto Veloz, president of the Eastern Hotel Association, which represents the tourist sector in the area that was battered by Fiona on Monday. He added that the hotels had been preparing for Fiona’s arrival for days and had taken steps to minimize the impact.

Tourism is the Dominican Republic’s second-largest source of foreign revenues after remittances. The government had hoped that tourism revenue would rebound this year to near-prepandemic levels, helping the country to shore up its weakened public finances.

Sept. 19, 2022, 2:29 p.m. ET

Three reasons for Puerto Rico’s power outage.

The Trump administration restricted aid funds after the island’s last big storms.

In many ways, Puerto Rico is still reeling from its last storm calamity, in September 2017, when Hurricanes Irma and Maria tore through the island only a few weeks apart. Maria killed nearly 3,000 people. It took 11 months to restore power to all customers in the territory — a stretch, combined with that in the U.S. Virgin Islands, that researchers called the largest blackout in the nation’s history, based on the number of people affected and its duration.

While FEMA conducted extensive relief work in the storm’s immediate aftermath, federal funds for longer-term recovery on the island became snarled in political squabbling in Congress. The Trump administration also placed restrictions on portions of the island’s aid out of concerns that the money would be mismanaged or squandered. Puerto Rican officials have called these concerns overblown, though they acknowledged that bureaucratic obstacles had impaired recovery projects.

The Biden administration began freeing up the aid and removing the restrictions shortly after taking office last year, as part of an effort to address racial disparities in the impact of climate change.

Puerto Rico’s government has been slow to rebuild.

Today, even with more government money flowing to Puerto Rico, progress rebuilding after Irma and Maria is still slow.

As of last month, the island’s government had spent only about $5.3 billion, or 19 percent, of the $28 billion in funding that FEMA has committed for post-2017 recovery projects, according to Christopher P. Currie, a director in the Government Accountability Office’s homeland security and justice team. A large majority of this spending — 81 percent — has gone to emergency relief, such as debris removal, Mr. Currie said. Considerably less has gone toward permanent works such as improvements to roads and utilities.

Mr. Currie disclosed the figures in testimony last week before a House subcommittee regarding FEMA’s work in Puerto Rico since Irma and Maria. He also identified several reasons the recovery has been a slog.

Local officials in some parts of Puerto Rico don’t have the experience or understanding of federal regulations to manage FEMA’s grant programs, Mr. Currie said. Inflation has driven up project costs. Municipalities have had trouble hiring engineers and contractors. The parts and materials for construction projects have taken a long time to procure because of delays in global supply chains, Mr. Currie said.

Anne Bink, an associate administrator in FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, told the same House subcommittee last week that the agency was better prepared to help Puerto Rico weather a big storm than it was in 2017, partly by keeping more emergency supplies on the island.

FEMA today has twice the number of generators on Puerto Rico, nine times the water, 10 times the meals and eight times the number of tarps compared with 2017, Ms. Bink said. The agency has also made it easier for homeowners there to receive disaster aid, she said.

Climate change is leading to wetter storms.

Scientists will need time to pin down exactly how global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels contributed to Hurricane Fiona. But in general, rising sea levels brought about by climate change are leading to more dangerous storm surges from tropical cyclones: If coastal waters are already elevated, a storm surge can cause damage farther inland. Higher temperatures are also causing more water to evaporate from the oceans, and warmer air holds more moisture. That means storms can come with heavier rain.

As the planet continues to get hotter, scientists expect tropical cyclones to become stronger on average globally. There might be slightly fewer, scientific models predict. But each could carry a bigger wallop.

Today, scientists are working to understand how climate change is affecting how hurricanes form and where they travel, in addition to their size and strength, said Kevin A. Reed, a climate scientist at Stony Brook University.

One recent study found that climate change added 10 percent to peak three-hour rainfall rates during the 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season.

“If you get two feet of rain, 10 percent is a couple inches of rain,” Dr. Reed said — enough to cause substantially more damage in vulnerable places. “That’s a lot of rainfall to have in addition to what you would have had before.”

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

‘I had not prepared.’ For many in Puerto Rico, Fiona came as a surprise.

Government officials should have given the public more warning, she said.

“I think the government minimized what was going to happen,” Ms. Alvarado said. “I found out it was a hurricane at 11 a.m. on Sunday, so I left everything and ran to the supermarket. I had not prepared for a hurricane.”

Pablo Rafael Caraballo, a chaplain at the San Germán campus of Puerto Rico’s Inter American University, said his hometown, Sabana Grande, was quiet as people started leaving their houses to survey the damage and help clear a road that leads to an expressway.

There were some signs that supplies were running low, he said, but residents were coming together and drawing on their experience from Hurricane Maria.

“I saw people standing in line to shop in the local bakeries that have power generators,” Mr. Caraballo said. “Some gas stations are closed because they have run out.”

During a news conference Monday, officials in Puerto Rico warned of continuing rains and urged residents to stay in safe locations. Emergency officials have been focusing on rescuing people and reaching areas cut off by the storm. Crews, including the National Guard, rescued 426 people overnight, including a woman who had been holding tight to a tree for more than seven hours.

For many, the storm was a test of whether the government would improve its response after Maria.

“We have been struggling for five years and see the same conditions from the government in the management of emergency situations,” Ms. Alvarado said. “It’s frustrating.”

Ms. Alvarado suddenly had a sign that things were changing for the better, as trucks from Puerto Rico’s power company, LUMA, appeared.

“A LUMA brigade just drove by my house,” she said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting.

New York will send Spanish-speaking police officers to help Puerto Rico.

New York had also sought assistance from businesses like Delta, Jet Blue and Coca-Cola, which had pledged to provide sanitary supplies, water and baby formula, Ms. Hochul said.

On Sunday, President Biden issued an emergency declaration regarding the situation in Puerto Rico, unlocking federal funding and FEMA support. Ms. Hochul said that, because of the declaration, New York expected to see much of the aid it provided reimbursed by the federal government.

Ms. Hochul also said that New York would be sending drones to the Dominican Republic to aid in damage surveillance and resource distribution efforts, as requested by President Luis Abinader.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Sept. 19, 2022, 1:43 p.m. ET

Damage in Puerto Rico won’t compare with the big 2017 storm, the governor says.

Both storms knocked out electricity across the entire island, but Mr. Pierluisi said that this time, he expected power to be restored in a majority of households “in a question of days.” The delays after Hurricane Maria were much longer. Many of the island’s more than three million residents were without power for months, and it took officials 11 months to fully repair the island’s aging and unreliable electricity grid, which has long been a source of frustration for Puerto Ricans.

As Fiona’s rains continued to drench Puerto Rico on Monday, it was too soon to know the full extent of the harm the storm had done. Mr. Pierluisi stressed that officials were still in the rescue and response phase of the emergency and had not begun to assess the scale of the damage or the island’s path to recovery.

Still, he said, the local government’s response had so far been “exemplary” compared with what happened after Maria, though he added it was no time to celebrate.

“Maria served as a lesson, an exercise for our emergency response teams at all levels,” Mr. Pierluisi, a New Progressive Party member who took office in 2021, said during a news conference. “In terms of the coordination we’ve seen, there’s a big difference.”

Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm in September 2017. Its powerful winds, with gusts exceeding 100 m.p.h., destroyed thousands of homes, wiped out the island’s agriculture and immediately left the island without access to communications. Recovery was painfully sluggish, and the lack of potable water, fuel and food supplies in the wake of the storm prompted an exodus of tens of thousands of residents to the United States mainland.

Hurricane Fiona, in contrast, was a Category 1 storm, pummeling the island with heavy rains that caused widespread flooding and dangerous mudslides, especially in the southern part of the island.

Sept. 19, 2022, 1:21 p.m. ET

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Gov. Pedro Pierluisi of Puerto Rico faces his first storm in the top job.

Mr. Pierluisi briefly served as governor for five days in 2019, after the resignation of Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló, who was in office when Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. Mr. Rosselló had named Mr. Pierluisi to be his secretary of state so that Mr. Pierluisi could succeed him when he resigned.

But the Puerto Rico Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Pierluisi had been unconstitutionally sworn in as governor, in violation of the line of succession. Mr. Pierluisi stepped down after the ruling, and the justice secretary, Wanda Vázquez, took over the governorship instead. Mr. Pierluisi then defeated Ms. Vázquez in the primary for the New Progressive Party nomination in 2020 and went on to win the general election.

A former lawyer who comes from a political family, Mr. Pierluisi served as secretary of justice for three years when Mr. Rosselló’s father, Pedro J. Rosselló, was governor.

Mr. Pierluisi has faced mounting criticism over how LUMA Energy, the private consortium that began handling power transmission and distribution on the island last year, has struggled to keep the electricity on during Fiona, which knocked out power to much of the island.

He said at a news conference on Monday that officials were still in the rescue and response phase of the emergency and had not yet assessed the scale of storm damage. But he said he expected power to be restored on the island in a matter of days, and not take months, as happened after Hurricane Maria.

Puerto Rico’s Power Grid Was Already Fragile and Inefficient

Storms have undermined a historically fragile and inefficient power system. Five years ago, Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico within weeks of each other, laying bare the tenuous state of the island’s infrastructure.

Irma knocked out power to 70 percent of the island when it grazed Puerto Rico in early September 2017. Two weeks later, after Maria shredded power lines, residents again faced the reality of living without electricity for months.

Maria damaged 80 percent of the system, an intricate network of 2,400 miles of high-voltage transmission lines, some of it threaded along mountains, and 30,000 miles of lower-voltage distribution lines that go to neighborhoods and homes.

Up to $3.2 billion was spent on emergency repairs in the aftermath of Maria, a Category 4 storm. Congress earmarked about $10 billion to rebuild the system.

The island’s beleaguered government-owned power authority struggled to manage the recovery after the storms. It hired Whitefish Energy Holdings, a small and inexperienced contractor linked to the Trump administration’s interior secretary at the time, and FEMA called in the Army Corps of Engineers, which had never rebuilt a major grid after a storm, as a New York Times investigation in 2018 showed.

The government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA, has been hobbled by financial woes and $9 billion in debt. Its failure to provide reliable and affordable power has weakened the island’s broader economic growth.

In 2020, Puerto Rico awarded a 15-year contract to LUMA Energy, a private Canadian-American consortium, to operate the transmission and distribution system and handle reconstruction. Puerto Rico is paying the new company a fixed annual fee of $115 million.

But privatization has been no match for the challenges of aging equipment, lack of maintenance and other inefficiencies.

After LUMA took over, a majority of the island’s 1.5 million electricity customers continued to live through rolling blackouts. Demonstrators marched in San Juan, the capital, in one of many protests over the years triggered by the island’s electricity problems.

Wayne Stensby, LUMA’s chief executive, blamed the system’s problems on a backlog of outages, a cyberattack and resistance from some PREPA employees.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Sept. 19, 2022, 12:40 p.m. ET

The storm is the third hurricane this month after a slow start to the season.

In early August, scientists at NOAA issued an updated forecast for the rest of the season, which still called for an above-normal level of activity. In it, they predicted the season — which runs through Nov. 30 — could see 14 to 20 named storms, with six to 10 turning into hurricanes that sustain winds of at least 74 m.p.h. Three to five of those could strengthen into what NOAA calls major hurricanes — Category 3 or stronger — with winds of at least 111 m.p.h.

Last year, there were 21 named storms, after a record-breaking 30 in 2020. For the past two years, meteorologists have exhausted the list of names used to identify storms during the Atlantic hurricane season, an occurrence that has happened only one other time, in 2005.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Fiona hits the Dominican Republic, setting off damaging mudslides.

The Dominican emergency authorities said that about 800 people had been evacuated, and that at least two highways had been damaged by mudslides. No deaths were immediately reported, though the authorities said they were still evaluating the full extent of the damage. Some towns remained unreachable because of power and telecommunication outages.

A hurricane warning — which indicates that a storm is imminent or already occurring — was in effect as of 11 a.m. Monday from Cabo Caucedo, just east of Santo Domingo, to Cabo Frances Viejo on the northern coast. A hurricane watch — which indicates that storm conditions are possible — was in effect for the northern coast, from Cabo Frances Viejo west to Puerto Plata.

The storm was not expected to have a major impact on the rest of the country, with the National Weather Service forecasting just one to four inches of rain. But the eastern section of the country could get as much as 15 inches of rain, forecasters said.

“Life-threatening flash and urban flooding is likely for eastern portions of the Dominican Republic through early Tuesday,” the National Weather Service said.

The Category 1 storm made landfall southwest of Punta Cana at about 7:30 a.m. It was expected to take several hours to pass over the Dominican Republic before emerging over the southwestern Atlantic on Monday afternoon.

Father Miguel Ángel Gullón, director of Radio Seibo in the eastern Dominican Republic, said the storm was worse than Hurricane Maria, which battered the country in 2017. He added that he and other residents of his city, El Seibo, sheltered in place while the hurricane passed through on Monday, and that the full extent of the damage was unclear.

Videos posted on social media or shared by residents showed the streets of El Seibo and the neighboring cities of Punta Cana and Guimate littered with debris, electrical cables, broken antennas and parts of billboards.

The government’s legal adviser, Antoliano Peralta, said the hurricane had destroyed the tourist pier in the resort town of Miches, a major attraction, and was threatening send the nearby Yeguada River over its banks.

“A great disaster,” he said.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Five years later, Fiona brings back painful memories of Maria.

But its lasting impact was just beginning.

Public fury bubbled up at the government’s response to the storm; a 2018 report found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been unprepared for a disaster on the scale of Maria, which was one of three storms to hit the United States in quick succession in 2017. It described a chaotic and disorganized relief effort on the island that was plagued by logistical problems.

Years on, housing still hadn’t been found for tens of thousands of survivors still living under leaky tarps, while others lived in wrecked homes. A grass-roots movement channeling the anger formed, fueling a popular uprising in 2019 that lasted 15 days and led to former Gov. Ricardo A. Rosselló stepping down.

Five years later, unreliable electricity remained a fact of life on the island.

“I think all of us Puerto Ricans who lived through Maria have that post-traumatic stress of, ‘What is going to happen, how long is it going to last and what needs might we face?’” Danny Hernández, who works in San Juan, told The Associated Press while he was stocking up with supplies.

Advertisem*nt

SKIP ADVERTIsem*nT

Sept. 19, 2022, 9:51 a.m. ET

Follow Hurricane Fiona’s path.