The first hurricane of this year’s Atlantic season gathered force far out to sea late on Monday, while weaker storm systems drenched the northeastern Caribbean and the Florida Panhandle.
Hurricane Bill was expected to become a major storm in the next couple of days, with winds topping 177kph as it moved on a track expected to be near Bermuda by the end of the week. It had become a Category 2 storm with winds whipping at 160kph.
The storm is very large, with tropical winds extending out 241km, so Bermuda faced a potential threat even if the Atlantic island avoided a direct hit, said Nick Camizzi, a forecaster with the British territory’s weather service.
PHOTO: AP
“We are keeping an eye on it for sure,” Camizzi said.
It was too soon to tell if Bill would threaten the eastern coast of the US, said John Cangialosi, a meteorologist at the US National Hurricane Center. It was not expected to threaten Florida.
“The system is certainly large and eventually will be a powerful hurricane,” Cangialosi said.
But colder waters and wind shear could weaken it when it moves farther north.
What began as Tropical Storm Ana, the first named storm of the season, weakened into a tropical depression as it raced past the Leeward Islands, US and British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, apparently moving too quickly to cause more than minor flooding.
Along the Florida Panhandle, Tropical Storm Claudette quickly weakened after it made landfall at Fort Walton Beach.
By late Monday, much of the rain and storms had ceased and all flood watches and warnings had expired. Milligan and Crestview, Florida, saw the most rain with about 115mm. Other areas in Florida, Alabama and Georgia received 250mm to 100mm.
Even as Ana dissipated, it posed a potential threat to Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where impoverished riverside communities are extremely vulnerable to flooding.
Dominican authorities evacuated more than 100 people from areas at risk for flooding and mudslides, but the rains turned out lighter than expected as the system broke apart.
Still, officials maintained flood alerts for 12 provinces in the east, warning that the storm could drop up to 150mm of rain in some areas.
“As of now the rivers are rising above their normal levels, but nonetheless we do not have flooding, thank God,” said Carlos Paulino, a deputy director of the Center for Emergency Operations in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo.
Officials in neighboring Haiti, devastated last year by four successive storms that killed some 800 people and caused US$1 billion in damage, said they were relieved that Ana had weakened. But residents were warned to continue to be cautious around rivers and the coast.
In Puerto Rico, rain from Ana flooded highways in the capital, San Juan, and three schools closed as a precaution in the northern coastal city of Arecibo. The US territory was expecting 5cm to 10cm of rain.
Ana was moving at a relatively fast pace, said Dave Roberts, a Navy hurricane specialist at the US hurricane center. Although tropical storm watches were canceled for the storm on Monday afternoon, Roberts said it could still be a big rain event for Haiti and the Dominican Republic, especially in higher elevations.
A man in his mid-20s died after being pulled from surf as Claudette approached on Sunday. In Bay County, authorities searched for another man whose boat ran aground on Sunday night, though they believed he made it ashore.
Far out in the Pacific, Hurricane Guillermo weakened to a tropical storm with maximum sustained winds near 72kph. Guillermo was centered about 845km east of Hilo, Hawaii, and moving west-northwest near 32kph.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver