Gusty winds and blowing rain buffeted eastern Cuba on Saturday as Tropical Storm Fay neared the island after killing at least five people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Cuban officials ordered evacuations from flood-prone areas of coastal provinces where Fay was expected to come ashore on Sunday before crossing the Caribbean nation and heading toward Florida as a likely hurricane.
By 3am GMT on Sunday, Fay had top winds of near 72km/h and was located about 280km south-east of Camaguey, Cuba, the United States National Hurricane Centre in Florida said.
Weather reports showed the US naval station at Guantánamo Bay was getting rain and winds gusting up to 83km/h.
Fay was cruising west at 22km/h across very warm waters — 32 degrees Celsius, said an official at Cuba’s Meteorological Institute — and therefore was likely to strengthen before crossing the island.
It was possible Fay would clip the communist island twice, once in the south-east near Guantánamo Bay, and again in the centre as it begins a turn to the north-west and eventually the north.
The US hurricane centre did not expect Fay to become a hurricane, which has top sustained winds of at least 118km/h, until it passed through Cuba, but hurricane watches were posted for a large stretch of the island’s central provinces.
Cuban forecasters predicted rains of up to 20cm from the storm.
Five dead
Heavy rains from the storm killed at least five people on the island of Hispaniola, shared by the Dominican Republic, a major tourist magnet, and impoverished Haiti.
A 34-year-old Dominican woman died and two nephews, aged 13 and five, were missing after their truck was engulfed by flood waters raging through a gully 140km east of Santo Domingo, the Caribbean country’s emergency operations centre said.
Four people died in Haiti, at least three of them drowning in rain-swollen rivers, said Alta Jean-Baptiste, head of the country’s civil protection office.
The hurricane centre said Fay, after emerging from Cuba on Monday, was likely to brush the Florida Keys and hit the west coast of Florida as a hurricane on Tuesday.
The state government of Florida declared an emergency to free up federal funds to deal with the approaching storm and the authorities in the low-lying Florida Keys said they expected to order tourists to evacuate on Sunday morning.
The state’s most densely populated areas around Miami and Fort Lauderdale, in the south-east, were not out of the line of fire should the storm steer more to the east than expected.
Areas of the Gulf of Mexico where about one-quarter of US oil and 15% of US natural gas are produced did not appear to be at immediate risk.
But long-range storm forecasts are prone to error, especially when it comes to intensities, and Shell said it was pulling 200 workers from offshore operations in the eastern Gulf of Mexico ahead of the storm.
In addition to the hurricane alert in Cuba, tropical-storm warnings and watches were in effect for the central Bahamas, the Cayman Islands and Jamaica. — Reuters