At least nine people died in Haiti and two were missing on Sunday, when heavy rainfall from Tropical Storm Laura buried large swaths of the country under murky floodwaters and threatened to overpower the country's only hydroelectric dam.
Laura was headed for a possible hit later in the week on the Louisiana coast as a hurricane, along with Hurricane Marco. But first, it was expected to make landfall Sunday evening somewhere between the provinces of Santiago de Cuba and Granma.
"The waves are already spilling over the Gibara seawall. Many residents have already left the area for fear of flooding," Guillermina Montejo, a resident of the coastal Cuban city of Holguin, told el Nuevo Herald.
The center of Tropical Storm Laura passed into Haiti Sunday morning after moving from Puerto Rico and through the Dominican Republic, where it also left at least four dead and a destructive trail of floods, heavy rains and wind in its wake.
Among the dead: two children.
In Haiti, a 10-year-old girl in the southeastern town of Anse-a-Pitre near the Haiti-Dominican border was killed when a tree fell on her house. In the neighboring Dominican Republic, a 7-year-old died, along with a 44-year-old woman, when their house collapsed in Santo Domingo, the capital, which saw severe flooding and damaged homes.
Video posted on Twitter showed Dominican Civil Defense workers pulling trapped residents out of the rubble in at least one area of Santo Domingo known as Palmarejo.
"We want to show solidarity with the pain of these families; we ask God to bring them comfort and we ... will be there to help them with their needs," Juan Manuel Mendez Garcia, the director of the Center of Emergency Operations, said in a press conference.
Laura left more than 1 million Dominicans without power, according to the country's electric utility, and large parts of the Dominican Republic without water.
Mendez said the storm forced the evacuation of more than 1,050 Dominicans, damaged roads, knocked down trees and downed power lines while leaving large swaths of the country's 11 million residents without services. Damages, he said, were concentrated in the northern and eastern regions of the country.
While he did not say how many homes had been destroyed, Mendez pointed out that many houses were under the threat of being destroyed "because of what has happened to the rivers."
In Haiti, Laura's destruction was equally as severe.
Officials spent the better half of an afternoon press conference Sunday pleading with Haitians to not cross rivers, and to protect themselves.
And while they pleaded with Haitians to stay put in some communities, they also begged for some in others "to hurry and flee."
An overflowing Peligre Dam in Haiti's Central Plateau meant that authorities had to quickly release its waters, endangering the rice plains and farms in the nearby Artibonite Valley.
"All the radio stations that are here who can call the people of the Artibonite, tell them, 'Attention!' Secure their belongings because there is going to be a lot of water in the Artibonite Valley," Public Works Minister Nader Joaseus said.
The dam is a key supplier of electricity and irrigation for the rice plains and farms north of Port-au-Prince. The probability of its destruction by the storm "was high," Joaseus said. That would not only create a new crisis for the rural farmers of the Artibonite, who were already struggling with yields as Haiti undergoes a severe food shortage amid the coronavirus pandemic, but "the little bit of electricity, the 10 megawatts that it gives us, we also won't have it,"Joaseus said.
"If Peligre breaks, it will be catastrophic," Agriculture Minister Patrick Severe added, while begging for Haitians cooperate. "We can diminish the effects of flooding but we can't eliminate it."
With all of their disaster-prone country under siege by Laura, Haitians experienced flash floods in the southeast, wind gusts of 50 miles per hour in the north and severe flooding throughout, including in the capital, where some were forced to wade through waist-high dirty water.
Even Port-au-Prince's Toussaint Louverture International Airport was not spared flood waters.
Overnight, Haiti had raised its severe weather alert from orange to red, the country's highest.
Prime Minister Joseph Jouthe, offering his and the president's condolences over the loss of life and property, said earlier in the day: "Five people are already dead, and it's five too many."
The deaths were mainly in the southeast _ where a woman in her 50s was swept away while trying to cross the Gosseline river in the town of Marbial _ and in the metropolitan Port-au-Prince area.
"From what I am looking at," said the mayor of a flooded Cite Soleil slum, Joel Janeus, "it's not just Cite Soleil that will have a problem if they do not hurry up and do something."
Janeus said the shantytown, which sits like a basin on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, was inundated with flood waters.
"It's not some people who are flooded. It's the entire area," he said.
In a 10 a.m. advisory, Haitians were warned not to take Laura lightly.
"Generalized heavy rain accompanied by sustained wind gusts is currently being observed throughout the country," the advisory said. "Some (regions) of the country including the northeast, Artibonite, center, west and southeast already have 100% soil saturation."
The storm was moving over Haiti with a west-northwest trajectory at about 19 miles per hour. The forecasts called for as much as 12 inches of rain in some parts of the country, particularly in the Nippes, Grand Anse, west and southeast.
Though there were 800 shelters available throughout the country, it was unclear how many actually opened. The government acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic made managing shelters difficult and that the coronavirus also had depleted available resources.
With the storm expected to batter Haiti into the evening, Haitians were warned not to let their guard down.
This was also the message in Puerto Rico, even after Laura's passing. Puerto Rican officials told residents there still remained a high risk of rip currents across the northern coast as the storm moved away from the U.S. territory.
Earlier in the day, Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez said there had been no loss of life.
At least 23 storm-related incidents, including six landslides along roads in the municipalities of Comerio, San German, Corozal, and Villalba, were reported by the Department of Transportation and Public Works, Vazquez said during a late Sunday morning press conference.
She also mentioned an incident involving two teens, ages 17 and 19, who went to a local swimming hole in Ciales on Saturday, as the storm passed. The teens ended up trapped after the water levels of the river rose and they were forced to spend the night on top of a rock until rescuers retrieved them Sunday morning.
And just as the storm left more than a million Dominicans without power and water, it did the same in Puerto Rico, which suffers from repeated blackouts even without storms.
On Saturday, more than 200,000 customers of the Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority were reported have lost power., though Vazquez said the number had dropped to around 33,000 as of 9 a.m.
But Angel Figueroa Jaramillo, president of the Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union, tweeted that the number was approximately 50,000 by 11:15 AM.
In addition to the blackout, around 61,000 clients of the Puerto Rico Aqueducts and Sewers Authority did not have water on Sunday morning, said Vazquez, who added that 70% of the water service interruptions were due to the lack of electricity.
At 3 p.m. as life threatening flash floods continued over portions of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a tropical storm warning remained in effect for the Turks and Caicos Islands and southeastern Bahamas as Laura headed toward eastern Cuba.
A tropical storm watch was also in effect for the Bahamian island of Andros, while other islands in the chain were under alert, according to the Bahamas Department of Meteorology.
"Residents in the Turks and Caicos Islands and the southeast Bahamas will continue to experience gusty winds up to tropical storm force with pockets of showers and thunderstorms this afternoon and tonight," Deputy Director Basil Dean said Sunday. "Residents should remain indoors during heavy showers and thunderstorms as there is the possibility of tornadic activity."
In Cuba, warnings were also issued.
At 3 p.m., Laura's center was just 55 miles off Punta de Maisi, the eastern end of Cuba, where gusts of winds of more than 50 miles per hour were already reported.
A tropical storm warning was in effect for all Cuban provinces. The entire country could see heavy rains that could cause floods, landslides, and coastal swells like those left by Laura during her passage through the Greater Antilles.
The National Civil Defense warned that the storm could intensify and issued a "cyclonic alarm" advisory for the eastern provinces and Camaguey, which indicates the imminent passage of a storm. The rest of the central provinces are on alert.
Local authorities were rushing Sunday morning to clean streets, secure buildings, protect crops, and evacuate residents from vulnerable areas, such as the coastal city of Baracoa, in Guantanamo, which is just recovering from the damage caused by Hurricane Isaias in late July. But there were no reports on government media of widespread evacuations.
Montejo, the Holguin resident, remained worried.
"The worst will come later," she said. "Everyone knows the situation in the country, how difficult it is to get food. If this destroys the few crops that we have, it will be tough for us."
El Nuevo Herald staff writer Mario J. Penton contributed to this report.
