Laura kills 10-year-old girl in Haiti; thousands in Dom Rep without power
Published:Sunday | August 23, 2020 | 12:00 AMCMC
(CMC): A 10-year-old girl was killed in Haiti today when a tree fell on a house in the town of Anse-à-Pitres, to the southeast of the capital, Port-Au-Prince, as Tropical Storm Laura lashed sections of the French-speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM) state.
The Directorate of Civil Protection said the process of evacuating high-risk areas is continuing with the support of local authorities.
The Ministry of Education also announced that it is considering closing schools that also serve as emergency shelters. Emergency evacuation coordinators are on standby across the country and are also tasked with overseeing measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in emergency shelters .
Meanwhile, in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, gusts of wind and the intense downpours have left more than a million homes without electricity.
The light and power company, Distribuidora de Electricidad del Este, confirmed that the loss of supply caused the shutdown of at least 103 circuits, affecting 578,000 customers.
The company has assured the public that work is being done to restore services to more than 90,000 customers affected by the outage.
In its update at 11 a.m. (local time), the Miami-based National Hurricane Center said the centre of Tropical Storm Laura was located near latitude 19.2 degrees north, longitude 73.2 degrees west. Laura is moving toward the west-northwest near 21 miles per hour (33 kilometres per hour), and this general motion with some decrease in forward speed is expected over the next couple of days.
Based on the forecast track, the centre of Laura will move near or over Cuba tonight and Monday, and move over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico Monday night and Tuesday.
Laura is expected to move over the central and northwestern Gulf of Mexico Tuesday night and Wednesday.
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