By Jennifer Hiller and Ernest Scheyder
HOUSTON (Reuters) – Hurricane Marco and Tropical Storm Laura hit the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, forcing thousands of coastal citizens in Louisiana and Cuba to flee, and flooding roads in the Haitian capital, damage to the region is expected to take a hit. worst-case scenario this week.
Marco, who became a Sunday with sustained winds of 120 km/h (120 km/h), is expected to make landfall on Monday along the Louisiana coast.
Laura, who hit the Dominican Republic and Haiti the previous Sunday, killing at least 10 others before arriving in Cuba on Sunday night, is expected to become a hurricane before making landfall in Texas or Louisiana on Thursday.
U.S. President Donald Trump issued a crisis for Louisiana on Sunday. In the past he had issued a similar one for Puerto Rico.
In New Orleans, Billy Wright spent Sunday buying bottled water, non-perishable food and an axe to the attic, which can be used to cut a roof if flooding blocks doors and windows. The 33-year-old attorney lives with his fiancée in a one-story space a few blocks from a canal that ran aground around Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“You would have it and you wouldn’t want to be stuck in your attic with the flooding emerging,” Wright said. “Having two consecutive storms is a big concern.”
Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards, warned that tropical typhoon strong winds would reach Monday, telling citizens that if they didn’t leave Sunday night, they could get Marco and Laura out.
Laura can be a Category 2 or 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale in five steps to measure hurricane intensity and move west closer to Houston, said Chris Kerr, meteorologist at DTN, a provider of energy, agriculture and climate knowledge.
Category 2 storms experienced winds of at least km/h. The threshold for category 3 storms is 178 km/h (111 mph).
In the Dominican Republic, at least 3 other people died, in addition to a mother and her 7-year-old son, as a result of the collapse of the walls. Laura has knocked out more than a million people in the country, forced more than a thousand people to evacuate and collapse in several houses along the Isabela River, the government said.
In Port-au-Prince, others dive to their waists in muddy waters in some of the worst floods the Haitian capital has experienced in years.
The Haitian government has reported seven deaths, adding that at least two other people were swept away by the floods and a 10-year-old woman crushed when a tree fell on her home. The capital’s coastal neighborhoods were full of rubble.
Laura hit eastern Cuba on Sunday night with sustained winds of 60 mph (95 km/h) tearing down trees and ripping off the fragile roof of buildings as she began a 24-hour forecast from east to west along the largest Caribbean south coast. Island.
The Cuban said that electricity had been cut off in the eastern province of Guantanamo and would be closed from province to province as winds rose across the country as a precautionary measure.
Officials and residents, already exhausted by a six-month war opposed to the coronavirus pandemic and severe scarcity it caused, rushed as Laura rushed to evacuate thousands of others along the coast and in areas of the flood-prone interior.
BRACE LOUISIANA, TEXAS
Consecutive hurricanes that hit the U.S. coast in a matter of days can lead to a prolonged era of harmful weather, the National Hurricane Center said Sunday.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent groups to operations centers in Louisiana and Texas, spokesman Earl Armstrong said. The firm is in a position for back-to-back storms, he said, pointing to 2004 when four hurricanes hit Florida in six weeks.
Officials from the coastal parish of Lafourche, Louisiana, ordered citizens in low spaces to evacuate at noon on Sunday. The U.S. Coast Guard also issued a warning to the port of New Orleans, asking ships to plan for the evacuation of safe spaces.
The storms were in addition to the coVID-19 propagation considerations. Tulane University, New Orleans’ largest personal employer, announced that it would close its center on Monday.
At Grand Isle, at the southern tip of Louisiana, the government was applying sandbags to its cover tax as power corporations disposed of marine platform personnel and halted oil production.
Equinor completed the evacuation of its Titan oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico of the United States and halted oil production at the plant, a spokesman said Sunday. BHP Group Plc closed and evacuated its oil rigs in Shenzi and Neptune, a spokeswoman said.
Oil producers BP Plc, Chevron Corp and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, closed 58% of offshore oil production in the Gulf and 45% of herbal fuel production on Sunday. The region accounts for 17% of total oil production in the United States and 5% of herbal fuel production in the United States.
(This story went on to remove the superfluous words in the fifth paragraph)
(Reporting through Jennifer Hiller, Ernest Scheyder and Gary McWilliams in Houston, Marc Frank and Sarah Marsh in Havana, Andre Paultre at Port-au-Prince, Ezequiel Abiu Lopez in Santo Domingo, Barbara Goldberg in New York and Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles; Edited through Chizu Nomiyama, Lisa Shumaker and Daniel Wallis)