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Hurricane Matthew, the most powerful Atlantic tropical storm in almost a decade, took aim for the Bahamas on Wednesday after it flooded streets, flattened homes and left a trail of destruction in Haiti.
Matthew, a powerful storm with sustained winds of 140 mph, made landfall in Haiti just after 7 a.m. (8 a.m. ET) Tuesday. With communications down across much of the island, it remained too early to accurately assess the damage Wednesday morning, but civil defense officials said many homes had been destroyed or damaged in the south.
Matthew brushed past the eastern tip of Cuba at about 8 p.m. ET, almost 53 years to the day after Hurricane Flora killed 2,000 Cubans on Oct. 3, 1963, the National Hurricane Center said. Landfall came at Juaco in a remote, sparsely populated part of the island, and preliminary reports indicated that the soaking rains and driving winds caused relatively little damage.
The Bahamas might not be so lucky when Matthew arrives sometime Wednesday night because of two factors that make it especially dangerous, according to weather experts.
Tropical storm systems typically diminish as they bump up against land, but Matthew "did not weaken even with its interaction with Hispaniola," the Caribbean island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic
Running into Cuba also did little to weaken Matthew, whose top sustained winds had dipped only to 125 mph by 2 a.m. - still a dangerous category 3 hurricane.
The other factor is that Matthew is simply "really, really slow," moving at only about 8 mph
Matthew similarly lingered over Haiti - a staggering blow to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere - and officials feared that the country would have to contend with yet another devastating humanitarian disaster.
So far, Haiti's civil protection agency has reported just two deaths, one of them a fisherman who drowned in rough water churned up by the storm.
Six other deaths have also been blamed on Matthew: One man died in Colombia, four people were killed in the Dominican Republic, and a teenager was killed in St. Vincent and the Grenadines as the storm moved through the Caribbean.
But officials fear the death toll could rise, especially in and around the southern town of Les Cayes, which absorbed the first blow from Matthew and where hundreds were hunkering down in homes without electricity and roofs.
Update 07 10 2016
Officials in Haiti said at least 283 people have been killed in a devastating hit by Hurricane Matthew, which clobbered the Caribbean country on Tuesday.
22 окт 2024
