Hurricane Fiona, category 1, entered the Dominican Republic through Cabo San Rafael (east of the country), with winds of 140 kilometers per hour and higher gusts, after leaving catastrophic damage in Puerto Rico.
This is the third of the current cyclone season, and the first to hit the country in 18 years, according to meteorologist John Morales. The atmospheric phenomenon moves towards the west/northwest at about 15 kilometers/hour. Hurricane-force winds extend about 45 kilometers outside its center and storm-force winds about 220 kilometers.
During his intervention in the program The alarm of Noticias SIN, the expert warned about the rains that the phenomenon could bring. “Fiona’s rains are close to 800 millimeters in a matter of 24 hours,” he said, while assuring that “one of the problems with rain, in these meteorological phenomena, is that it does not cause as much fear as the winds”, to This is why people don’t realize how much rain has fallen, “and at what rate it has fallen,” until after the community is flooded.
Only in Puerto Rico fell between 18 and 25 inches of rain. Given this scenario, the biologist and environmentalist Luis Carvajal explained to Edith Febles on the program The day, that amount is equivalent to 135 millimeters. “That is half of what falls on average in Puerto Rico throughout the year… that is the average concentrated in a few hours, and the water has not finished falling.”
In the Dominican Republic, 375 millimeters of rain is forecast, which is equivalent to 17 inches of rain. Carvajal staged that scenario in Higüey and La Romana, explaining that given the conditions in which these communities find themselves, this scenario becomes “a disgrace.”
Journey
“Punta Cana lived through difficult hours,” Morales lamented, while the United States National Hurricane Center (NHC) issued a hurricane warning (12 to 24 hours) for the north coast of the Dominican Republic from Cabo Caucedo to Cabo Francés Viejo. and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
On the forecast track, the center of Fiona will move over the eastern Dominican Republic this morning and emerge over the southwestern Atlantic this afternoon. In anticipation of the danger posed by the hurricane, the government suspended working hours on Monday and declared 13 of its 32 provinces, located in the north and east of the country, on red alert.